Image of a gold on gold collision from the PHENIX Detector.
Courtesy of BNL
From Micro to Macro: RHIC Produces
an Unexpected State of Matter
Physics and Astronomy
Prof. Barbara Jacak’s team on the
PHENIX Experiment at Brookhaven National Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC) has contributed to results showing that high energy ion collisions
produce an extremely hot and dense “perfect” liquid-like substance.
This is likely to be the just-after-the-Big Bang quark-gluon plasma
that was anticipated, but exhibits some surprising properties. PHENIX,
with a dozen detector subsystems targeting many of the particles that emerge
from the RHIC collisions, was specifically designed with unique and unprecedented
capabilities for future efforts to define and characterize this previously
unknown state of matter. Increased understanding of basic structure
at the sub-atomic scale will further illuminate the origins of matter
on the cosmic scale.