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Experimental Work
Jessica Kintner

For about the past 12 years, I've been doing research in Relativistic Heavy Ion Physics. These experiments all involve smashing two nuclei (the heavy ions) into each other at very high (relativistic) speeds. The goal of these experiments is to learn more about the nuclear equation of state.

An equation of state describes the relationship between pressure, volume, and temperature. (You might recognize the equation of state for an ideal gas: PV=nRT.) We can determine an equation of state by studying what happens as the temperature or pressure changes. If you can change the temperature enough, you might see a phase transistion. For example, as you add heat to ice it can undergo a phase transition from solid to liquid. To study such a phase transition for nuclear matter, you must heat and/or compress the nucleus. Colliding nuclei is the only way to do this in a laboratory.

The EOS Experiment was performed at the Bevalac at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. The EOS Collaboration consisted of about 45 physicists from seven institutions around the world. At the time, I was a graduate student in the UC Davis Nuclear Group. In this experiment, we studied collisions between various nuclei over an energy range from 0.1 to 1.9 GeV per nucleon. The logo shown at the left is a picture of charged particle tracks in the Time Projection Chamber (TPC).

Experiment 895 was performed at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. Collisions at E895 spanned a range of energies from 2 to 8 GeV per nucleon. The logos for the two experiments look similar because the same detector, the EOS TPC, was used to acquire data for both experiments. You see many more tracks in E895 since the collisions produced more energy - which in turn produced more particles. Several students from Saint Mary's worked with me on data analysis of this experiment. Local E895 page.
The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, usually known as the STAR Experiment, was performed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven. In this experiment, two beams of heavy ions were smashed into each other to provide a significant increase in energy over fixed target experiments. Most physicists from the collaboration now believe we have seen evidence for the quark-gluon plasma. QGP is an extremely hot, dense state of nuclear matter. Studying the QGP might reveal new insights about neutron stars and what the universe was like the first few microseconds after the Big Bang.