Münster 2011 – scientific programme
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HK: Fachverband Physik der Hadronen und Kerne
HK 63: Hauptvorträge VII
HK 63.1: Invited Talk
Friday, March 25, 2011, 11:45–12:15, HS1
Overview of the RHIC Beam Energy Scan at STAR — •Alexander Schmah — Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA
The main goal of the RHIC Beam Energy Scan (BES) is the exploration of the QCD phase diagram to the region of an expected 1st order phase transition between the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) and the hadron gas phase. In the year 2010, the first part of the BES program was successfully completed. Data sets include the reaction system Au+Au at √sNN= 7.7, 11.5, and 39 GeV.
For the first time in 2010, the STAR multi-purpose detector system at RHIC was equipped with a fully installed time-of-flight barrel, which covers 2π in the azimuthal angle and ±0.9 in pseudorapidity. Furthermore the material budget of the tracking system was reduced by removing the silicon vertex tracker in the inner part of the detector. These changes enable STAR to identify charged particles up to high momenta and reduce background due to gamma conversions, respectively. The proposed goal at STAR was achieved for 7.7 GeV with 5 million recorded Au+Au events, while even more data have been collected for the other two beam energies. Various analyses have been started to find a signature for the phase transition or the critical point. These include elliptic and directed flow, fluctuations as well as di-lepton and hadron spectra. In this talk, an overview of the BES run is given and first results of the data analyses are presented.