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A Program Supported by DOE Grant DE-FG03-93ER40792

In 1999, experiments will begin at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. What will happen when Gold nuclei first collide at center-of-mass energies of 200 GeV per nucleon, nearly 42 TeV?

before                          after

To confront this important question, we are assembling a reseach team in the University of Arizona Department of Physics. Our theoretical goal is to understand the nature of the highly excited many body system - the quark gluon plasma - that may be produced in these collisions. The phenomenological challenge is to reconstruct the state of this system from the plethora of fragments seen in the laboratory. Our research topics are as follows:

o Dilepton Production from Heavy Quark Decays at RHIC
o Partonic Picture of Nuclear Shadowing Effect at Small x
o Jet Quenching in High-Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions
o Testing for QCD Energy Loss at High Feynman x
o Disoriented Chiral Condensate
o Charmonium Suppression in Nuclear Collisions
o Parton dynamics in high energy collisions

Currently, our group consists of Sean Gavin and Ina Sarcevic. For additional information on our group, you can see our DOE research proposals from December 1997, December 1995, and a progress report from 1996.

Contact Ina, Sean or other heavy ion enthusiasts at Tucson.