The STAR Experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory

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The STAR Experiment at Brookhaven National
Laboratory

• Michael Cherney
• Creighton University

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Traditional High Energy Physics Probing the Small

• High Energy gives Small Wavelength? h / p
• Small Wavelength needed to Resolve the Small?min
  1.22 ? / d

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The Standard Model
12 Force Carriers
12 Basic Particles
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Hadrons -Particles Containing Quarks

• Mesons
• quark-antiquark pairs
• most of the hadrons coming out of a collision
• Baryons
• 3 quarks
• the hadrons going into the collision (protons
  and neutrons)

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RHIC Physics Probing Particle Thermodynamics

• Phases of Atomic Matter
• solid
• liquid
• gas
• plasma of constituants

• Phases of Nuclear Matter
• liquid drop model
• hadron gas
• quark-gluon plasma

Spherical Nucleus
Spherical Water Drops
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The Big Bang and Particle Evolution
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Expansion and Cooling
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Recreating the Process
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Pressure and Heat from Collisions
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Progression of a Collision
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Fireball from a Gold-Gold Collision
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The Little Bang and Particle Evolution
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Brookhaven National Laboratory
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The Brookhaven Accelerators
STAR
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Tandem Van de Graaff
Ion Source and Initial Acceleration
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Booster
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AGS
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Transfer line
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RHIC tunnel
Superconducting Magnets
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Radio Frequency Sources
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The STAR Detector
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The STAR Facility
The detector can be rolled in and out of the
interaction region.
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STAR in the Assembly Building
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The Interaction Region
Waiting for STAR to be rolled in
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Cabling
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Detector in Place
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Side View of STAR
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The Time Projection Chamber
L 4 m
d 4 m
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Drift Field
Cylindrical Field Cages and Central Membrane
provide uniform drift field.
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TPC Endcap
Copper Pads
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Ionization in the TPC
Very large electric field near the wire results
in ionization. Smaller field in drift region
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Constructed in Berkeley
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Moved to Brookhaven
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The STAR Magnet
Pole Tip
Barrel
0.5 Tesla Magnet
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Magnetic Field Allows Charge and Momentum
Determination

• F qv x B
• ma qv x B
• m v2/r qvB?
• mv qB?r

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Magnet Fabrication
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Beam Pipe
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Silicon Vertex Detector
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On the platform
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Data Acquistion
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Trigger
Millions of Collisions per Second Only a Few
Recorded for Analysis
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Access
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Monitoring the Experiment
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Reconstructing the Collision
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Event Monitoring
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Acknowledgments

• STAR Operations Group
• RHIC Operations Group
• Thomas McShane, SJ