Session U3: Invited Session: DNP Prize Session

Edward A. Bouchet Award Talk: Nuclear liquid-gas phase diagram - What have learned?

Heavy ion reactions started fragmenting nuclei since the 1980. In the intervening decades the study of such fragmentations taught us that nuclear matter has both liquid and gaseous phases that can undergo phase transitions, can exhibit critical phenomena, and many other rich phenomena. In this talk a summary of experimental and theoretical efforts leading to the understanding of the thermodynamical properties of nuclear matter will be presented, including those recent ones that extend the phase diagram in a new direction: isospin.   

Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics Talk: Matter at High Energy Density and Ultra-relativistic Nuclear Collisions

At energy densities greater than those of atomic nuclei, various forms of matter made from quarks and gluons are predicted by the theory of strong interactions. Such matter may be studied in the high energy collisions of strongly interacting particles. I qualitatively discuss the properties of this high energy density matter, and describe how such matter is seen in the collisions of high energy strongly interacting particles.   

Tom W. Bonner Prize In Nuclear Physics Talk: Jet Tomography of Quark Gluon Plasmas in High Energy Nuclear Collisions

The attenuation pattern of high energy jet fragments in ultra-relativistic nuclear collisions provides information on the space-time evolution and dynamical properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP) phase of matter discovered at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and observed at higher densities at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). First I review our jet tomography theory of quark and gluon energy loss in a weakly coupled picture of the QGP. While the average attenuation pattern of light and heavy quark jets were well accounted for in that picture, the predicted azimuthal elliptic asymmetry of jets was underestimated when realistic bulk collective flow effects were taken into account. I then show that the elliptic asymmetry of jet fragments can also be quantitatively understood when nonperturbative lattice QCD constraints on the suppression of color electric fluctuations and the enhancement of color magnetic fluctuations near the critical QCD confinement temperature, Tc $\sim$ 160 MeV, are incorporated into the theory. Our analysis provides a novel quantitative connection between the jet transport properties controlling the hard jet quenching observables and the bulk viscous transport properties controlling the remarkable ``perfect fluidity'' of QGP observed at RHIC and LHC.   

Tom W. Bonner Prize in Nuclear Physics Talk: Tracking Detectors in the STAR Experiment at RHIC

The STAR experiment at RHIC is designed to measure and identify the thousands of particles produced in 200 Gev/nucleon Au on Au collisions. This talk will focus on the design and construction of two of the main tracking detectors in the experiment, the TPC and the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) pixel detector. The TPC is a solenoidal gas filled detector 4 meters in diameter and 4.2 meters long. It provides precise, continuous tracking and rate of energy loss in the gas (dE/dx) for particles at $+$ - 1 units of pseudo rapidity. The tracking in a half Tesla magnetic field measures momentum and dE/dX provides particle ID. To detect short lived particles tracking close to the point of interaction is required. The HFT pixel detector is a two-layered, high resolution vertex detector located at a few centimeters radius from the collision point. It determines origins of the tracks to a few tens of microns for the purpose of extracting displaced vertices, allowing the identification of D mesons and other short-lived particles. The HFT pixel detector uses detector chips developed by the IPHC group at Strasbourg that are based on standard IC Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. This is the first time that CMOS pixel chips have been incorporated in a collider application.