Description:

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a versatile accelerator situated at Brookhaven National Laboratory (USA) which commenced operations in the year 2000. It collides heavy ions as well as polarized protons at center of mass energies of up to 200 GeV per nucleon in Au+Au and 500 GeV in p+p.

RHIC and its detectors were designed and built to discover a new state of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) and to measure its properties by studying the ultra-relativistic Au+Au collisions. In these collisions, large amounts of energy are concentrated in small volumes. The nucleon constituents, quarks and gluons, may become de-confined at these energy densities to form the QGP, a state of matter that is believed to have existed in the early universe, shortly after the Big Bang. The observation of jet quenching, collective motion, and excesses of electrons and high-momentum protons suggests that, indeed, a thus far unobserved state of hot and dense matter has been created at RHIC. It resembles an ideal and strongly-coupled fluid, not the weakly-coupled gas of quarks and gluons that had been expected.

Besides collisions of heavy ions, RHIC has collided deuteron and gold ions at high energy. These collisions make it possible to study the modification of elementary QCD processes in cold nuclear matter (CNM). This provides insight in coherence effects or shadowing in nuclei, the saturation of gluons at small momentum, the energy loss of quarks or gluons in CNM, and soft multiple scattering effects.

Last, RHIC has the unique capability to collide protons that are polarized along or perpendicular to their momentum direction. The physics program with these collisions gives fundamental insight in the spin structure of the nucleon. Although our knowledge of the origin of the nucleon spin has greatly improved over the last twenty years, many fundamental questions still remain unanswered.

The course is aimed at students with a basic understanding of high energy and nuclear physics.

The course will present the broad experimental physics programs at RHIC and discuss the latest results.

Lecture topics:

1. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and its Detectors

2. The spin structure of the proton

3. Cold nuclear matter effects in d+Au collisions

4. Search for the quark gluon plasma in heavy ion collisions

5. Anti-matter production at RHIC

6. The future at RHIC and at an Electron-Ion Collider