The sPHENIX particle detector. © Brookhaven National Laboratory
The sPHENIX particle detector has cleared an important test in its mission to study the universe’s earliest matter.
The sPHENIX detector, built at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), is designed to measure the debris from high-speed particle crashes closely. From this debris, scientists hope to learn more about quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a super-hot mix of quarks and gluons that likely existed for only millionths of a second after the Big Bang, before cooling into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today.
The sPHENIX particle detector. © Brookhaven National Laboratory
The detector has now made a crucial measurement proving its accuracy. Physicists call this a “standard candle” test, a reliable, well-known benchmark used to confirm a detector’s precision.
Specifically, sPHENIX measured the number of charged particles created when two gold ions collide. It also showed how this number changes depending on whether the collisions are head-on or more of a glancing hit. The results: head-on collisions created about 10 times more charged particles, and these particles were also about 10 times more energetic than those from glancing collisions.
source Journal of High Energy Physics, MIT
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