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Posts Tagged ‘RHIC’

In the late 1980s, as particle colliders probed deeper into the building blocks of nature, there were hints of a strange and paradoxical behaviour in the heart of atoms. Fundamental particles have a curious quantum mechanical property known as “spin”, which the electron carries in magnitude ½. While the description of electron’s spin is fairly simple, protons are made up of many particles whose “spins” can add together in complicated ways and yet remarkably, its total spin turns out to be the same as the electron: ½. This led to one of the great mysteries of modern physics: how do all the particles inside the proton conspire together to give it a ½ spin? And what might this mean for our understanding of hadrons, the particles that make up most of the visible universe?

[This article is largely intended for a lay-audience and contains an introduction to foundational ideas such as spin. If you’ve had a basic introduction to Quantum Mechanics before, you may wish to skip to section marked —— ]

We’ve known about the proton’s existence for nearly a hundred years, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that we knew all there was to know about it. For many of us, our last exposure to the word “proton” was in high school chemistry, where they were described as a little sphere of positive charge that clumps with neutrons to make atomic nuclei, around which negatively charged electrons orbit to create all the atoms, which make up Life, the Universe and Everything1.

2000px-Proton.svg

The simple, three-quark model of a proton (each coloured circle is a type of “quark”).

Like many ideas in science, this is a simplified model that serves as a good introduction to a topic, but skips over the gory details and the bizarre, underlying reality of nature. In this article, we’ll focus on one particular aspect, the quantum mechanical “spin” of the proton. The quest to measure its origin has sparked discovery, controversy and speculation that has lasted 30 years, the answer to which is currently being sought at a unique particle collider in New York.

The first thing to note is that protons, unlike electrons2, are composite particles, made up from lots of other particles. The usual description is that the proton is made up of three smaller “quarks” which, as far as we know, can’t be broken down any further. This picture works remarkably well at low energies but it turns out at very high energies, like those being reached at the at the LHC, this description turns out to be inadequate. At that point, we have to get into the nitty-gritty and consider things like quark-antiquark pairs that live inside the proton interacting dynamically with other quarks without changing its overall charge. Furthermore, there are particles called gluons that are exchanged between quarks, making them “stick” together in the proton and playing a crucial role in providing an accurate description for particle physics experiments.

So on closer inspection, our little sphere of positive charge turns out to be a buzzing hive of activity, with quarks and gluons all shuffling about, conspiring to create what we call the proton. It is by inferring the nature of these particles within the proton that a successful model of the strong nuclear force, known as Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), was developed. The gluons were predicted and verfied to be the carriers of this force between quarks. More on them later.

Proton structure

A more detailed model of the proton. The golden chains between the quarks (the coloured spheres) are representations of gluons, transferred between them. Quark anti-quark pairs are also visible with arrows representing spins.

That’s the proton, but what exactly is spin? It’s often compared to angular momentum, like the objects in our everyday experience might have. Everyone who’s ever messed around on an office chair knows that once you get spun around in one, it often takes you a bit of effort to stop because the angular momentum you’ve built up keeps you going. If you did this a lot, you might have noticed that if you started spinning with your legs/arms outstretched and brought them inwards while you were spinning, you’d begin to spin faster! This is because angular momentum (L) is proportional to the radial (r) distribution of matter (i.e. how far out things are from the axis of rotation) multiplied by the speed of rotation3 (v). To put it mathematically L = m × v × r where m is just your constant mass. Since L is constant, as you decrease r (by bringing your arms/legs inwards), v (the speed at which you’re spinning) increases to compensate. All fairly simple stuff.

So clearly, for something to have angular momentum it needs to be distributed radially. Surely r has to be greater than 0 for L to be greater than 0. This is true, but it turns out that’s not all there is to the story. A full description of angular momentum at the quantum (atomic) level is given by something we denote as “J”. I’ll skip the details, but it turns out J = L + S, where L is orbital angular momentum, in a fashion similar to what we’ve discussed, and S? S is a slightly different beast.

Both L and S can only take on discrete values at the microscopic level, that is, they have quantised values. But whereas a point-like particle cannot have L > 0 in its rest frame (since if it isn’t moving around and v = 0, then L = 0), S will have a non-zero value even when the particle isn’t moving. S is what we call Spin. For the electron and quarks, it takes on the value of ½ in natural units.

Spin has a lot of very strange properties. You can think of it like a little arrow pointing in a direction in space but it’s not something we can truly visualise. One is tempted to think of the electron like the Earth, a sphere spinning about some kind of axis, but the electron is not a sphere, it’s a point-like particle with no “structure” in space. While an electron can have many different values of L depending on its energy (and atomic structure depends on these values), it only has one intrinsic magnitude of spin: ½. However, since spin can be thought of as an arrow, we have some flexibility. Loosely speaking, spin can point in many different directions but we’ll consider it as pointing “up” (+½) or “down” (- ½). If we try to measure it along a particular axis, we’re bound to find it in one of these states relative to our direction of measurement.

Spin250

Focus on one of the red faces. When the cube rotates every 360 degrees, the red ribbon appears to go above and below the cube alternatively! Because the cube is coupled to its environment, it takes 720 degrees to return it to it’s original orientation.


One of the peculiar things about spin-½ is that it causes the wave-function of the electron to exhibit some mind bending properties. For example, you’d think rotating any object by 360 degrees would put it back into exactly the same state as it was, but it turns out that doesn’t hold true for electrons. For electrons, rotating them by 360 degrees introduces a negative sign into their wave-function! You have to spin it another 360 degrees to get it back into the same state! There are ways to visualise systems with similar behaviour (see right) but that’s just a sort of “metaphor” for what really happens to the electron. This links into the famous conclusion of Pauli’s that no two identical particles with spin-½ (or any other half-integer spin) can share the same quantum mechanical state.

——

Spin is an important property of matter that only really manifests on the quantum scale, and while we can’t visualise it, it ends up being important for the structure of atoms and how all solid objects obtain the properties they do. The other important property it has is that the spin of a free particle likes to align with magnetic fields4 (and the bigger the spin, the greater the magnetic coupling to the field). By using this property, it was discovered that the proton also had angular momentum J = ½. Since the proton is a stable particle, it was modelled to be in a low energy state with L = 0 and hence J = S = ½ (that is to say, the orbital angular momentum is assumed to be zero and hence we may simply call J, the “spin”). The fact the proton has spin and that spin aligns with magnetic fields, is a crucial element to what makes MRI machines work.

Once we got a firm handle on quarks in the late 1960s, the spin structure of the proton was thought to be fairly simple. The proton has spin-½. Quarks, from scattering experiments and symmetry considerations, were also inferred to have spin-½. Therefore, if the three quarks that make up the proton were in an “up-down-up” configuration, the spin of the proton naturally comes out as ½ – ½ + ½ = ½. Not only does this add up to the measured spin, but it also gives a pleasant symmetry to the quantum description of the proton, consistent with the Pauli exclusion principle (it doesn’t matter which of the three quarks is the “down” quark). But hang on, didn’t I say that the three-quarks story was incomplete? At high energies, there should be a lot more quark-antiquark pairs (sea quarks) involved, messing everything up! Even so, theorists predicted that these quark-antiquark pairs would tend not to be polarised, that is, have a preferred direction, and hence would not contribute to the total spin of the proton.

If you can get the entirety of the proton spinning in a particular direction (i.e. polarising it), it turns out the scattering of an electron against its constituent quarks should be sensitive to their spin! Thus, by scattering electrons at high energy, one could check the predictions of theorists about how the quarks’ spin contributes to the proton.

In a series of perfectly conducted experiments, the theory was found to be absolutely spot on with no discrepancy whatsoever. Several Nobel prizes were handed out and the entire incident was considered resolved, now just a footnote in history. OK, not really.

In truth, the total opposite happened. Although the experiments had a reasonable amount of uncertainty due to the inherent difficulty of polarising protons, a landmark paper by the European Muon Collaboration found results consistent with the quarks contributing absolutely no overall spin to the proton whatsoever! The measurements could be interpreted with the overall spin from the quarks being zero5. This was a complete shock to most physicists who were expecting verification from what was supposed to be a fairly straightforward measurement. Credit where it is due, there were theorists who had predicted that the assumption about orbital angular momentum (L = 0) had been rather ad-hoc and that L > 0 could account for some of the missing spin. Scarcely anyone would have expected, however, that the quarks would carry so little of the spin. Although the nuclear strong force, which governs how quarks and gluons combine to form the proton, has been tested to remarkable accuracy, the nature of its self-interaction makes it incredibly difficult to draw predictions from.

The feynman diagram for Deep Inelastic Scattering (electron line at the top, proton on the bottom). This type of scattering is sensitive to quark spin.

The Feynman diagram for Deep Inelastic Scattering (electron line at the top, proton on the bottom, with a photon exchanged between them). This type of scattering is sensitive to quark spin.

Future experiments (led by father and son rivals, Vernon and Emlyn Hughes6 of CERN and SLAC respectively) managed to bring this to a marginally less shocking proposal. The greater accuracy of the measurements from these collaborations had found that the total spin contributions from the quarks was actually closer to ~30%. An important discovery was that the sea quarks, thought not to be important, were actually found to have measurable polarisation. Although it cleared up some of the discrepancy, it still left 60-70% of spin unaccounted for. Today, following much more experimental activity in Deep Inelastic Scattering and precision low-energy elastic scattering, the situation has not changed in terms of the raw numbers. The best estimates still peg the quarks’ spin as constituting only about 30% of the total.

Remarkably, there are theoretical proposals to resolve the problem that were hinted at long before experiments were even conducted. As mentioned previously, although currently impossible to test experimentally, the quarks may carry orbital angular momentum (L) that could compensate for some of the missing spin. Furthermore, we have failed to mention the contribution of gluons to the proton spin. Gluons are spin-1 particles, and were thought to arrange themselves such that their total contribution to the proton spin was nearly non-existent.

BNL AERIALS

The Brookhaven National Laboratory where RHIC is based (seen as the circle, top right).


The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York is currently the only spin-polarised proton collider in the world. This gives it a unique sensitivity to the spin structure of the proton. In 2014, an analysis of the data collected at RHIC indicated that the gluons (whose spin contribution can be inferred from polarised proton-proton collisions) could potentially account for up to 30 of the missing 70% of proton spin! About the same as the quarks. This would bring the “missing” amount down to about 40%, which could be accounted for by the unmeasurable orbital angular momentum of both quarks and gluons.

As 2016 kicks into gear, RHIC will be collecting data at a much faster rate than ever after a recent technical upgrade that should double it’s luminosity (loosely speaking, the rate at which proton collisions occur). With the increased statistics, we should be able to get an even greater handle on the exact origin of proton spin. 


The astute reader, provided they have not already wandered off, dizzy from all this talk of spinning protons, may be tempted to ask “Why on earth does it matter where the total spin comes from? Isn’t this just abstract accountancy?” This is a fair question and I think the answer is a good one. Protons, like all other hadrons (similar, composite particles made of quarks and gluons) are not very well understood at all. A peculiar feature of QCD called confinement binds individual quarks together so that they are never observed in isolation, only bound up in particles such as the proton. Understanding the spin structure of the proton can inform our theoretical models for understanding this phenomenon.

This has important implications, one being that 98% of the mass of all visible matter does not come from the Higgs Boson. It comes from the binding energy of protons! And the exact nature of confinement and precise properties of QCD have implications for the cosmology of the early universe. Finally, scattering experiments with protons have already revealed so much to fundamental physics, such as the comprehension of one of the fundamental forces of nature. As one of our most reliable probes of nature, currently in use at the LHC, understanding them better will almost certainly aid our attempts to unearth future discoveries.

Kind regards to Sebastian Bending (UCL) for several suggestions (all mistakes are unreservedly my own).

 

[1] …excluding dark matter and dark energy which constitute the dark ~95% of the universe.

[2] To the best of our knowledge.

[3] Strictly speaking the component of velocity perpendicular to the radial direction.

[4] Sometimes, spins in a medium like water like to align against magnetic fields, causing an opposite magnetic moment (known as diamagnetism). Since frogs are mostly water, this effect can and has been used to levitate frogs.

[5] A lot of the information here has been summarised from this excellent article by Robert Jaffe, whose collaboration with John Ellis on the Ellis-Jaffe rule led to many of the predictions discussed here.

[6] Emlyn was actually the spokesperson for SLAC, though he is listed as one of the primary authors on the SLAC papers regarding the spin structure of the proton.

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This post was written by Brookhaven Lab scientists Shigeki Misawa and Ofer Rind.

Run 13 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) began one month ago today, and the first particles collided in the STAR and PHENIX detectors nearly two weeks ago. As of late this past Saturday evening, preparations are complete and polarized protons are colliding with the machine and detectors operating in “physics mode,” which means gigabytes of data are pouring into the RHIC & ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) every few seconds.

Today, we store data and provide the computing power for about 2,500 RHIC scientists here at Brookhaven Lab and institutions around the world. Approximately 30 people work at the RACF, which is located about one mile south of RHIC and connected to both the Physics and Information Technology Division buildings on site. There are four main parts to the RACF: computers that crunch the data, online storage containing data ready for further analysis, tape storage containing archived data from collisions past, and the network glue that holds it all together. Computing resources at the RACF are split about equally between the RHIC collaborations and the ATLAS experiment running at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

Shigeki Misawa (left) and Ofer Rind at the RHIC & ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) at Brookhaven Lab

Where Does the Data Come From?

For RHIC, the data comes from heavy ions or polarized protons that smash into each other inside PHENIX and STAR. These detectors catch the subatomic particles that emerge from the collisions to capture information—particle species, trajectories, momenta, etc.—in the form of electrical signals. Most signals aren’t relevant to what physicists are looking for, so only the signals that trip predetermined triggers are recorded. For example, with the main focus for Run 13 being the proton’s “missing” spin, physicists are particularly interested in finding decay electrons from particles called W bosons, because these can be used as probes to quantify spin contributions from a proton’s antiquarks and different “flavors” of quarks.

Computers in the “counting houses” at STAR and PHENIX package the raw data collected from selected electrical signals and send it all to the RACF via dedicated fiber-optic cables. The RACF then archives the data and makes it available to experimenters running analysis jobs on any of our 20,000 computing cores.

Recent Upgrades at the RACF

Polarized protons are far smaller than heavy ions, so they produce considerably less data when they collide, but even still, when we talk about data at the RACF, we’re talking about a lot of data. During Run 12 last year, we began using a new tape library to increase storage capacity by 25 percent for a total of 40 petabytes—the equivalent of 655,360 of the largest iPhones available today. We also more than doubled our ability to archive data for STAR last year (in order to meet the needs of a data acquisition upgrade) so we can now sustain 700 megabytes of incoming data every second for both PHENIX and STAR. Part of this is due to new fiber-optic cables connecting the counting houses to the RACF, which provide both increased data rates and redundancy.

With all this in place, along with those 20,000 processing cores (most computers today have two or four cores), certain operations that used to require six months of computer time now can be completed often in less than one week.

Looking Ahead

If pending budgets allow for the full 15-week run planned, we expect to collect approximately four petabytes of data from this run alone. During the run, we meet formally with liaisons from the PHENIX and STAR collaborations each week to discuss the amount of data expected in the coming weeks and to assess their operational needs. Beyond these meetings, we are in continual communication with our users, as we monitor and improve system functionality, troubleshoot, and provide first-line user support.

We’ll also continue to work with experimenters to evaluate computing trends, plan for future upgrades, and test the latest equipment—all in an effort to minimize bottlenecks that slow the data from getting to users and to get the most bang for the buck.

— Shigeki Misawa – Group Leader, RACF Mass Storage and General Services

— Ofer Rind – Technology Architect, RACF Storage Management

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Heat: Adventures in the World's Fiery Places (Little Brown, 2013). If you haven't already fallen in love with the groundbreaking science that's taking place at RHIC, this book about all things hot is sure to ignite your passion.

Bill Streever, a biologist and best-selling author of Cold: Adventures in the World’s Frozen Places, has just published his second scientific survey, which takes place at the opposite end of the temperature spectrum. Heat: Adventures in the World’s Fiery Places features flames, firewalking, and notably, a journey into the heart of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

I accompanied Streever for a full-day visit in July 2011 with physicist Barbara Jacak of Stony Brook University, then spokesperson of the PHENIX Collaboration at RHIC. The intrepid reporter (who’d already tagged along with woodland firefighters and walked across newly formed, still-hot volcanic lava—among other adventures described in the book) met with RHIC physicists at STAR and PHENIX, descended into the accelerator tunnel, and toured the refrigeration system that keeps RHIC’s magnets supercold. He also interviewed staff at the RHIC/ATLAS Computing Facility—who face the challenge of dissipating unwanted heat while accumulating and processing reams of RHIC data—as well as theorists and even climate scientists, all in a quest for understanding the ultrawarm.

The result is an enormously engaging, entertaining, and informative portrayal of heat in a wide range of settings, including the 7-trillion-degree “perfect” liquid quark-gluon plasma created at RHIC, and physicists’ pursuit of new knowledge about the fundamental forces and interactions of matter. But Streever’s book does more: It presents the compelling story of creating and measuring the world’s hottest temperature within the broader context of the Lab’s history, including its role as an induction center during both World Wars, and the breadth and depth of our current research—from atoms to energy and climate research, and even the Long Island Solar Farm.

“Brookhaven has become an IQ magnet, where smart people congregate to work on things that excite geniuses,” he writes.

Streever’s own passion for science comes across clearly throughout the book. But being at “the top of the thermometer” (the title of his final chapter, dedicated in part to describing RHIC) has its privileges. RHIC’s innermost beam pipes—at the hearts of its detectors, inside which head-on ion collisions create the highest temperature ever measured in a laboratory—have clearly left an impression:

“… I am forever enthralled by Brookhaven’s pipes. At the top of the thermometer, beyond any temperature that I could possibly imagine, those pipes explore conditions near the beginning of the universe … In my day-to-day life, bundled in a thick coat or standing before my woodstove or moving along a snow-covered trail, I find myself thinking of those pipes. And when I think of them, I remember that at the top of the thermometer lies matter with the audacity to behave as though it were absolutely cold, flowing like a perfect liquid…”

There’s more, a wonderful bit more that conveys the pure essence of science. But I don’t want to spoil it. Please read and share this book. The final word is awe.

The book is available for purchase through major online retailers and in stores.

-Karen McNulty Walsh, BNL Media & Communications Office

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Theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan

We sat down with Brookhaven theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan for a conversation about “color glass condensate” and the structure of visible matter in the universe.

Q. We’ve heard a lot recently about a “new form of matter” possibly seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe — a state of saturated gluons called “color glass condensate.” Brookhaven Lab, and you in particular, have a long history with this idea. Can you tell me a bit about that history?

A. The idea for the color glass condensate arose to help us understand heavy ion collisions at our own collider here at Brookhaven, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—even before RHIC turned on in 2000, and long before the LHC was built. These machines are designed to look at the most fundamental constituents of matter and the forces through which they interact—the same kinds of studies that a century ago led to huge advances in our understanding of electrons and magnetism. Only now instead of studying the behavior of the electrons that surround atomic nuclei, we are probing the subatomic particles that make up the nuclei themselves, and studying how they interact via nature’s strongest force to “give shape” to the universe today.

We do that by colliding nuclei at very high energies to recreate the conditions of the early universe so we can study these particles and their interactions under the most extreme conditions. But when you collide two nuclei and produce matter at RHIC, and also at the LHC, you have to think about the matter that makes up the nuclei you are colliding. What is the structure of nuclei before they collide?

We all know the nuclei are made of protons and neutrons, and those are each made of quarks and gluons. There were hints in data from the HERA collider in Germany and other experiments that the number of gluons increases dramatically as you accelerate particles to high energy. Nuclear physics theorists predicted that the ions accelerated to near the speed of light at RHIC (and later at LHC) would reach an upper limit of gluon concentration—a state of gluon saturation we call color glass condensate.* The collision of these super-dense gluon force fields is what produces the matter at RHIC, so learning more about this state would help us understand how the matter is created in the collisions. The theory we developed to describe the color glass condensate also allowed us to make calculations and predictions we could test with experiments. (more…)

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The Glue that Binds Us All

Wednesday, June 13th, 2012

RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab, found it first: a “perfect” liquid of strongly interacting quarks and gluons – a quark-gluon plasma (QGP) – produced by slamming heavy ions together at close to the speed of light. The fact that the QGP produced in these particle smashups was a liquid and not the expected gas, and that it flowed like a nearly frictionless fluid, took the physics world by surprise. These findings, now confirmed by heavy-ion experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, have raised compelling new questions about the nature of matter and the strong force that holds the visible universe together.

Similarly, searches for the source of “missing” proton spin at RHIC have opened a deeper mystery: So far, it’s nowhere to be found.

To probe these and other puzzles, nuclear physicists would like to build a new machine: an electron-ion collider (EIC) designed to shine a very bright “light” on both protons and heavy ions to reveal their inner secrets. (more…)

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On May 26, 2005, a new supercomputer, a pioneering giant of its time, was unveiled at Brookhaven National Laboratory at a dedication ceremony attended by physicists from around the world. That supercomputer was called QCDOC, for quantum chromodynamics (QCD) on a chip, capable of handling the complex calculations of QCD, the theory that describes the nature and interactions of the basic building blocks of the universe. Now, after a career of state-of-the-art physics calculations, QCDOC has been retired — and will soon be replaced by a new “next generation” machine. (more…)

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Dave Mosher (left) and Kendra Snyder inside the STAR detector at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, minutes after getting engaged. (photo courtesy of Dave Mosher/davemosher.com)

When Kendra Snyder, a science writer in Brookhaven Lab’s Media & Communications Office, entered the STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) last Friday afternoon to view some unusual crystalline deposits — supposedly formed in the beam pipe — she got an even bigger surprise: a diamond ring and a marriage proposal from fellow science writer Dave Mosher.

The unusual proposal, dubbed “The Nerdiest Marriage Proposal . . . Ever” on Mosher’s blog, triggered the interest of a reporter at The Daily, News Corporation’s new iPad-only daily newspaper. Snyder and Mosher were interviewed last night, and the story — which includes references to RHIC’s near-light-speed gold ion collisions — appears in today’s edition.

Even if you don’t have an iPad, you can view the video, “Geek Love,” here.

— Karen McNulty Walsh, Brookhaven Media & Communications

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Pumping Up Proton Polarization

Thursday, April 7th, 2011

Brookhaven Lab’s oldest and most-trophied workhorse, the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS), has broke its own world record for producing intense beams of polarized protons – particles that “spin” in the same direction.

Spin, a quantum property that describes a particle’s intrinsic angular momentum,  is used in a wide range of fields, from astronomy to medical imaging. But where spin comes from is still unknown.

In this picture of a proton-proton collision, the spin of the particles is shown as arrows circling the spherical particles. The red and green particles represent reaction products from the collision that are "seen" and analyzed by RHIC detectors.

To explore the mystery of spin, Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes beams of polarized protons at close to the speed of light. RHIC is the only machine in the world with this capability. But before reaching RHIC’s high-speed collision course, the protons travel about one million miles through a series of linear and circular accelerators, including the AGS, a 41-year old circular accelerator more than a half mile around. Home to three of BNL’s seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries, the AGS is Brookhaven’s longest-running accelerator.

Now, with a new upgrade, the AGS can keep up to 75 percent of those particles in the beam polarized while they accelerate – a 5 to 8 percent increase over the previous record. This feat was accomplished with custom-built power supplies created from old inventory and two revamped 1960s quadrupole magnets pulled from storage.

The two refurbished quadrupole magnets before being installed at the AGS

As the particles race through the AGS, two of the customized power supplies quickly pulse, hold, and pull back surges of power for each of the quadrupoles in a matter of milliseconds. Forty-two times within half a second, these pulsed currents produce magnetic kicks that keep the particles spinning in the correct direction.

For more details, see this story.

-Kendra Snyder, BNL Media & Communications

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Going in Circles

Wednesday, February 23rd, 2011

RHIC's main control room

If you were expecting this blog entry to be about the great song from the Friends of Distinction, it unfortunately won’t be the case. Instead, I’m taking you on the first trip this year of RHIC’s Yellow beam, one of two oppositely circulating particle beams that collide in the center of RHIC’s detectors. Why? Because the main goal of my first shift of Run11 was to get our particles to circulate in a closed orbit in the Yellow beamline. This will also give me the opportunity to get back to some of the technical terms I used in my previous post. So allow me to go over a little bit of accelerator physics theory for a minute.

RHIC, which stands for Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, is the name given to the large circular collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory; in order for particles to actually reach the collider from their source, they need travel through a series of other accelerators:

  1. the LINAC for protons, the Tandem-to-Booster beamline for heavy ions
  2. the Booster synchrotron
  3. the Booster-to-AGS (BtA) line
  4. the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS)
  5. the AGS-to-RHIC (AtR) line

(more…)

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Quark Matter game cards

Want to “play” with subatomic particles? You could work at Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) or the LHC — or you could play a new card game invented by a group of Hungarian students and RHIC/PHENIX collaborator Tamás Csörgő.

The students — Csaba Török and his friend Judit Csörgő (Tamás’ daughter) — invented the game as an entertaining way to learn about subatomic particles and their interactions, inspired by physics presentations in the science club at their secondary school, where Tamás was a frequent presenter.

The game, now available for purchase in both Hungarian and English, “provides a great opportunity for all people — not just physicists — to get acquainted with some of the elementary particles and concepts of the Standard Model,” said Csaba.

The deck consists of cards that represent particles and anti-particles from neutrinos, to electrons, positrons, muons, and quarks, which can be used for four different games. In “Quark Matter,” a game that models RHIC physics, the cards are mixed face up on a table, packed closely together to represent matter at the instant of collision — a quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The object for each player is to quickly extract particles as they would emerge from the collision, in order: non-interacting neutrinos and antineutrinos first, followed by electron/positron and muon/anti-muon pairs, and then quarks and anti-quarks as they hadronize, or freeze out, to form mesons, baryons, and anti-baryons — all while maintaining a neutral color charge.

Brookhaven's Educational Programs staff introduced the card game to students at Rocky Point Middle School.

As players race to extract cards, the “system” expands just as it does in a real RHIC collision. Players score points for each correct particle pick. More sophisticated players can name the particles as they extract them. Additional games teach and reinforce deeper concepts, such as weak decays and several laws of conservation.

For more information, visit particles card game.

-Karen McNulty Walsh, BNL Media & Communications

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