An Upgrade Proposal from the PHENIX Collaboration

Abstract

In this document the PHENIX collaboration proposes a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. This upgrade, sPHENIX, enables an extremely rich jet and beauty quarkonia physics program addressing fundamental questions about the nature of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), discovered experimentally at RHIC to be a perfect fluid. The startling dynamics of the QGP on fluid-like length scales is an emergent property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), seemingly implicit in the Lagrangian but stubbornly hidden from view. QCD is an asymptotically free theory, but how QCD manifests as a strongly coupled fluid with specific shear viscosity near $T_C$, as low as allowed by the uncertainty principle, is as fundamental an issue as that of how confinement itself arises.

476 authors, 237 pages, lists of figures and tables, 219 references

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• The RHIC Zero Degree Calorimeter
• A novel type of proximity focusing RICH counter with multiple refractive index aerogel radiator
• Single Spin Asymmetry $A_N$ in Polarized Proton-Proton Elastic Scattering at $\sqrt{s}=200$ GeV
• Technical Design Report for PANDA Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMC)

Cited by in corpus (25)

• Heavy Ion Collisions: The Big Picture, and the Big Questions
• Heavy-flavour and quarkonium production in the LHC era: from proton-proton to heavy-ion collisions
• Review of Jet Measurements in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Open Heavy-Flavor Production in Heavy-Ion Collisions
• A Common Tracking Software Project
• Probing Transverse Momentum Broadening in Heavy Ion Collisions
• Suppression of excited ${\rm Y}$ states relative to the ground state in PbPb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 5.02 TeV
• Jet-based measurements of Sivers and Collins asymmetries at the future Electron-Ion Collider
• Polarized jet fragmentation functions
• Evolution of the Mean Jet Shape and Dijet Asymmetry Distribution of an Ensemble of Holographic Jets in Strongly Coupled Plasma
• Light and heavy flavor dijet production and dijet mass modification in heavy ion collisions
• Implementation of ACTS into sPHENIX track reconstruction
• Consequences of high-$x$ proton size fluctuations in small collision systems at RHIC
• Medium-Induced Transverse Momentum Broadening via Forward Dijet Correlations
• The sPHENIX Micromegas Outer Tracker
• Nuclear gluons at RHIC in a multi-observable approach
• A derivation of the electric field inside MAPS detectors from beam-test data and limited TCAD simulations
• Requirements, Status, and Plans for Track Reconstruction at the sPHENIX Experiment
• The Future of High-Energy Heavy-Ion Facilities
• A Compact TPC for the sPHENIX Experiment
• Transverse Single-Spin Asymmetries of Midrapidity Direct Photons, Neutral Pions, and Eta Mesons in 200 GeV Polarized Proton-Proton Collisions at PHENIX
• Measurement of the ion blocking by the passive bi-polar grid
• Nonperturbative factorization breaking and color entanglement effects in dihadron and direct photon-hadron angular correlations in $p$$+$$p$ and $p$$+$A collisions
• Experimental aspects of quarkonia production and suppression in cold and hot nuclear matter
• Studying the QGP with Jets at the LHC and RHIC