Eighty scientists from across the United States and other nations will meet July 10-13 at Iowa State to discuss the first ever heavy ion collider located in New York.

The scientists are members of the PHENIX Collaboration, a group of about 450 scientists doing experiments using the PHENIX detector system at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

The PHENIX Experiment is the largest of the four experiments that have taken data at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The primary goal of PHENIX is to discover and study a new state of matter called the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

Iowa State’s Role

As well as hosting the event, Iowa State has several faculty members involved: John Hill, John Lajoie, Craig Ogilvie and Marzia Rosati, all professors of physics and astronomy; and Alexandre Sasha Lebedev, assistant scientist of physics and astronomy.

Iowa State scientists play an important role in PHENIX. The team is responsible for the operation of the Level-1 Trigger, which is a complex electronic subsystem that allows PHENIX to sort through 10 million collisions per second.

ISU scientists designed and built the trigger a decade ago and now are engaged in upgrading the trigger systems.

How the RHIC works

The RHIC is the first machine in the world capable of colliding heavy ions, which are atoms which have had their outer cloud of electrons removed.

The RHIC collides two beams of gold ions head-on when they’re traveling at nearly the speed of light. The beams travel in opposite directions around the RHIC’s 2.4-mile, two-lane “racetrack.” At the six intersections, the lanes cross, leading to an intersection.

When the ions collide at such high speeds at the right conditions the collision “melts” the protons and neutrons and, for a brief instant, liberates their constituent quarks and gluons.

Each of these particles provides a clue as to what occurred inside the collision zone.

In the past decade, the RHIC has enabled physicists to create a form of super high-temperature matter called the quark-gluon plasma that existed only a microsecond after the birth of the universe in “big bang.”

“By studying the plasma, scientists are learning about the nature of the very complex, strong force that stabilizes matter, thus allowing the universe as we know it to exist,” Hill said in a news release.

What is the PHENIX and how it works with the RHIC

The massive PHENIX detector is three stories high and has the square footage area of a mid-sized house. It was first used in 2000.

The PHENIX records hits along the flight path of the RHIC to measure the curvature and determine each particle’s momentum.

Within the system, other detectors identify the particle type and/or measure the particle’s energy and record where the collision occurred and determine whether each collision was central or peripheral.