A STAR rises in the eastern US


22 December 1999

head-on collision in the STAR detector sm

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Seasons greetings and best wishes for a prosperous New Year - and New Millenium - to all !

A few thousand particle tracks spray outwards in this simulation of a head-on collision between energetic gold nuclei at the heart of the STAR detector, which is ready for real collisions in 2000 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York. The aim is to detect signs of a novel state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, which should have existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang. Charged particles produced in the collisions leave tracks in a Time Projection Chamber (TPC) - basically a volume filled with gas and subject to an electric field. The charged particles leave trails of ionised gas, which are sensed at the end of the chamber. TPC in STAR is the world's largest, with a volume of about 50 cubic metres.

Credit: STAR collaboration