Speaker
Description
Super Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction eXperiment (sPHENIX) is a high energy nuclear physics detector which is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, New York. sPHENIX is designed primarily to measure Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), produced in heavy-ion collisions at RHIC. QGP is a short-lived, hot, dense partonic medium which evolves similar to a liquid with near zero viscosity. The QGP is studied via the statistical properties of the bulk hadrons produced shortly after it expands and cools as well as internally generated probes produced from out-of-equilibrium high momentum transfer partonic scatterings at early times within itself. In particular, these hard scatterings produce collimated sprays of hadrons (jets) and high momentum heavy flavor hadrons which sPHENIX uses to probe the inner workings of the QGP. This talk will give an overview of the sPHENIX detector as well as present preliminary results from its inaugural year of physics data taking with \sqrt{s} = 200 GeV proton-proton collisions.
