Results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Abstract

We describe the current status of the heavy ion research program at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The new suite of experiments and the collider energies have opened up new probes of the medium created in the collisions. Our review focuses on the experimental discoveries to date at RHIC and their interpretation in the light of our present theoretical understanding of the dynamics of relativistic heavy ion collisions and of the structure of strongly interacting matter at high energy density.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Figure of $\varepsilon(T)/T^4$, $P(T)/T^4$, and $s(T)/T^3$ for three light flavors of quarks on the lattice.
• Figure 2: Schematic diagrams of the PHENIX (above) and STAR (below) experiment configurations. Details of the various detector subsystems are given in rhic_nim_volume
• Figure 3: Schematic drawing of the time and energy density scales derived through the Bjorken picture. Taken from PHENIX_Whitepaper.
• Figure 4: Comparison of BRAHMS (circles), PHENIX (triangles), PHOBOS (crosses) and STAR (stars) particle ratios from central gold-gold collisions at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200~$GeV at mid-rapidity. The thermal model descriptions from kaneta are also shown as lines. Similar results are obtained in pbm.
• Figure 5: Azimuthal anisotropy ($v_2$) as a function of $p_{T}$ from minimum bias gold-gold collisions STAR_v2PHENIX_Whitepaper. Hydrodynamic calculations are shown as dashed lines.