Bathe will discuss his study of direct photon production at the April meeting of the American Physical Society at the Hyatt Regency in Dallas, Texas. Bathe's talk will be held on Tuesday, April 25 at 2:06 p.m. in Landmark B.
RHIC is a world-class scientific research facility used by hundreds of physicists from around the world to study what the universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its creation. RHIC drives two intersecting beams of gold ions head-on, in a subatomic collision. What physicists learn from these collisions may help us understand more about why the physical world works the way it does, from the smallest subatomic particles, to the largest stars.Ü
Working at the PHENIX detector, Bathe has studied gold-gold, deuteron-gold, and proton-proton collisions to test the theory of quantum chromodynamics, the theory of the strong force that holds atomic nuclei together.
"While gold-gold collisions are the most interesting, we also have to understand simpler systems with fewer particles," he said. "We want to understand the strong interactions between quarks and gluons, which are the components of protons and neutrons. In a collision of nuclei, they all break apart, resulting in thousands of particles."
The vast majority of the particles released in a nuclear collision interact strongly with the nuclear medium and lose large amounts of energy. How much energy they lose reveals information about the medium. By studying the energy spectrum of direct photons, Bathe and his colleagues have been able to determine the temperature and density of the matter, which in turn reveals the phase of the collision.
"The detector will tell us the energy and position where a photon hits it," Bathe said. "From the energy and position, we get a spectrum of energy distribution, whose slope tells us the temperature. If you know the temperature and density, you know the phase of the matter."
"By studying photons, particles that you can see, you can learn about the temperature of the nuclear matter you've created, " he said.
Research at PHENIX is funded by the Office of Nuclear Physics within the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and by a variety of other national and international organizations (see http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/funding.htm).
One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE's Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by the Research Foundation of State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization. Visit Brookhaven Lab's electronic newsroom for links, news archives, graphics, and more: http://www.bnl.gov/newsroom