Heavy-ion Reactions at the Energy and Isospin Frontiers

Michigan State University, East Lansing MI

Investigators

Abstract

0070818 Pratt Two important experimental nuclear physics facilities are becoming operational in the next two years. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory will collide heavy nuclei at extremely high energy. Within the reaction volume, conditions should exist to temporarily alter the structure of matter, liberating quarks from their usual confinement within hadrons and melting the non-perturbative structure of the QCD vacuum. The second facility is the Coupled Cyclotron Project (CCP) at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory. The CCP upgrade will provide beams of nuclei with exceptionally high neutron-to-proton ratios, which can be used to perform experiments before the nuclei undergo beta decay to the usual isotopes. By colliding such nuclei and observing the outgoing nuclear fragments, we hope to infer information about the equation of state of neutron-rich matter and to better understand the process of nuclear fragmentation. The principal aim of our work is to provide theoretical interpretations of the measurements in these facilities. Since the questions regarding bulk-matter properties are addressed only indirectly through detailed analyses of such experiments, theory plays an especially integral role in the analyses of such experimental results.