Speaker
Brooke Haag
(UC Davis)
Description
The RHIC Beam Energy Scan (BES) was proposed to search for the possible critical point and to study the nature of the phase transition between hadronic and partonic matter. Data from the NA49 experiment at CERN had suggested the onset of deconfinement at a collision energy of 7.7 GeV [1]. Though RHIC has not demonstrated sufficient luminosity to access collisions below 7.7 GeV in collider mode, collisions between beam nuclei and a gold target will allow STAR to study Au+Au collisions at center-of-mass energies of 3.0, 3.5, 4.0, and 4.5 GeV during the BES phase II. A proof-of-principle study, using collisions between beam halo nuclei and the aluminum beam pipe (runs in 2011 and 2012), has been investigated to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting physics from fixed-target collisions at center-of-mass energies below 7.7 GeV. Performance results from this proof-of-principle study will be presented. The gold target was installed for trigger tests in run 14. The first results of these tests will be presented.
[1] Xi (Omega) production in Pb+Pb Collisions at 158 GeV/c, G. Odyniec for the NA49 Collaboration, J. Phys. G, 23, 1827 (1997)
| On behalf of collaboration: | STAR |
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Primary author
Brooke Haag
(UC Davis)
