Recent Results from RHIC&Some Lessons for Cosmic-RayPhysicists
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) studies nuclear matter under a variety of conditions. Cold nuclear matter is probed with deuteron-gold collisions, while hot nuclear matter (possibly a quark-gluon plasma (QGP)) is created in heavy-ion collisions. The distribution of spin in polarized nucleons is measured with polarized proton collisions, and photoproduction is studied using the photons that accompany heavy nuclei. The deuteron-gold data shows less forward particle production than would be expected from a superposition of pp collisions, as expected due to saturation/shadowing. Particle production in AA collisions is well described by a model of an expanding fireball in thermal equilibrium. Strong hydrodynamic flow and jet quenching shows that the produced matter interacts very strongly. These phenomena are consistent with new non-perturbative interactions near the transition temperature to the QGP. This report discusses these results, and their implications for cosmic-ray physicists.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Director. Office of Science. Office of AdvancedScientific Computing Research. Office of Nuclear Physics
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 902025
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL-62046; R&D Project: NRNC; BnR: KB0201022; TRN: US0702749
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 14th Intl. Symp. on Very High Energy Cosmic RayInteractions, WeiHai, China, August 15-22, 2006
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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