The Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC

摘要

The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider~(2) (RHIC) will provide glimpses of the universe some microseconds after the Big Bang in ~197Au+Au collisions at beam energies up to 100 GeVucleon/beam (sq rootapprox39 TeV). RHIC will also become the world's highest energy polarized proton collider when it delivers up to 250 GeV p beams. Detailed studies of parton distribution functions will be possible, including for the first time the evaluation of the gluon contribution to the nucleon spin in a region where the theory is perturbative. This more complete information on the parton distributions will be applied to understand the data from RHIC's p+A and A+A programs. where the ion mass, A, can be anything. Deviations of the character of RHIC's central ~197Au+~197Au collisions from purely hadronic interpretations will then be apparent. These deviations may signal the formaiton of the Quark-Gluon Plasma-a (predicted) state of matter that has never before been stuided in the laboratory.