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The goal of this project is the study of collisions between relativistic
nuclei and ultimately the determination of the properties of nuclear
matter over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Extremely hot or
dense objects which are made of nuclear matter exist in the cosmos,
however, without the possibility direct study of neutron stars,
supernovae, or the Big Bang, one resorts to the challenging studies of
finite and transient systems as provided by nucleus-nucleus collisions.
It has become clear that in order to understand the nuclear equation of
state or to identify a transistion to a new state of matter, the
quark-gluon plasma, it will require a comprehensive and correlated set of
measurements as well as extensive calculations which relate the
observables to the nuclear matter variables.
This project focuses on the acquisition and analysis of such a set of data
using the Solenoidal
Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion
Collider (RHIC) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The
collection of detector systems which make up the STAR experiment provide
detailed information about individual collision events. The UCD group will
use data from these detectors to reconstruct the events and infer, from
the recorded debris, both the dynamics and the thermodynamics of the
collision.
UC Davis contributed to the design and construction of tracking chambers which extend STAR's coverage into the forward regions close to the beam axis (2.5 < |pseudorapidity| < 4.0), with momentum resolution and charge determination. These two small Forward Time Projection Chambers (FTPCs) were constructed at MPI (Munich). They fit inside the STAR central TPC. The FTPCs for STAR were installed for the second running period in year 2000.
UCD uses the STAR central TPC and the FTPCs to continue their studies of transverse, elliptic, radial, and longitudinal flow. These studies of the hydrodynamical behavior of nuclear matter allow one to study its compressibilty, and hence the nuclear equation of state.
