# Quark Matter 2012

12-18 August 2012
US/Eastern timezone

## The RHIC Beam Energy Scan Program: Results from the PHENIX Experiment

17 Aug 2012, 16:30
20m
Regency 2/3

### Regency 2/3

Oral Presentation

### Speaker

Jeffery Mitchell (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

### Description

Many recent lattice QCD calculations predict that there may be a first order phase transition from hadronic matter to a Quark-Gluon Plasma that ends in a critical point, with a continuous phase transition on the other side of the critical point. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has conducted a program to probe different regions of the QCD phase diagram in the vicinity of the possible critical point with a beam energy scan. During 2010 and 2011, RHIC provided Au+Au collisions to PHENIX at $\sqrt(s_NN)=$ 200 GeV, 62.4 GeV, 39 GeV, 27 GeV, 19.6 GeV, and 7.7 GeV. Analysis of the data concentrates on two strategies: looking for signs of the onset of deconfinement by comparing to results at the top RHIC energy, and searching for direct signatures of a critical point. Results presented will include the following: charged particle multiplicity at mid-rapidity, transverse energy production at mid-rapidity, energy loss via the $R_{AA}$ and $R_{CP}$ observables from a variety of identified particles including neutral pions and the $J/\psi$, collective flow measurements ($v_{2}$, $v_{3}$, $v_{4}$) from various particles including neutral pions, charged hadrons, and identified particles in order to examine the validity of the number of constituent quark scaling at lower energies, higher moments of the net charge distribution, and fluctuations of the charged particle multiplicity.

### Primary author

Jeffery Mitchell (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

### Presentation Materials

 qm2012-mitchell.pdf qm2012-mitchell.pptx

Paper files: