The Experiments
There are two detectors continuing to operate at RHIC: STAR (6 o'clock, and near the AGS-to-RHIC Transfer Line) and PHENIX (8 o'clock). PHOBOS (10 o'clock) completed its operation in 2005, and BRAHMS (2 o'clock) in 2006.
Among the two larger detectors, STAR is aimed at the detection of hadrons with its system of time projection chambers covering a large solid angle and in a conventionally generated solenoidal magnetic field, while PHENIX is further specialized in detecting rare and electromagnetic particles, using a partial coverage detector system in a superconductively generated axial magnetic field. The smaller detectors have larger pseudorapidity coverage, PHOBOS has the largest pseudorapidity coverage of all detectors, and tailored for bulk particle multiplicity measurement, while BRAHMS is designed for momentum spectroscopy, in order to study the so called "small-x" and saturation physics. There is an additional experiment, PP2PP (now part of STAR), investigating spin dependence in p + p scattering.
The spokespersons for each of the experiments are:
- STAR: Nu Xu (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, Nuclear Science Division)
- PHENIX: Barbara Jacak (Stony Brook University, Department of Physics and Astronomy)
- PP2PP: Włodek Guryn (Brookhaven National Laboratory, Physics Department)
Read more about this topic: Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
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