{"id":570,"date":"2020-06-10T21:44:06","date_gmt":"2020-06-11T02:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/?page_id=570"},"modified":"2020-06-17T21:53:15","modified_gmt":"2020-06-18T02:53:15","slug":"solenoidal-tracker-at-rhic","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/scholarship\/solenoidal-tracker-at-rhic\/","title":{"rendered":"Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC"},"content":{"rendered":"
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(L to R) Ty Fitch (ACU undergraduate), Jim Drachenberg (ACU Associate Professor), Mike Daugherity (ACU Professor), and Roy Salinas (ACU undergraduate) preparing the STAR detectors for forward upgrade construction at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Summer 2018.<\/p><\/div>\n

Throughout my time at Lamar and ACU, I have been an active member of the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) collaboration. STAR<\/a> is a consortium of over 700 nuclear scientists from 68 institutions across 14 different countries. The STAR detectors are located at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider<\/a> (RHIC), an “atom-smasher” facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory<\/a> (BNL) on Long Island. BNL is primarily supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science<\/a> and has hosted seven Nobel Prize-winning discoveries.<\/p>\n

Physics of STAR<\/h3>\n

To the best of our knowledge, the natural world is governed by four fundamental forces: the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and the strong force. The most familiar are undoubtedly the gravitational force that applies to everything having mass and the electromagnetic force that accounts for electrical and magnetic phenomena. Less familiar is the weak force that accounts for phenomena like radioactive decay. Finally, the strong force is what holds together the protons and neutrons that comprise the nuclei of atoms. The primary object of the STAR experiment is to understand phenomena related to this strong nuclear force.<\/p>\n

STAR is a versatile, multifaceted experiment with multiple objectives and physics programs. The program in which I have focused my research seeks to understand mysteries underlying the structure of protons and neutrons, the particles that comprise nearly everything around us. In the 1960s and 1970s, scientists learned that protons and neutrons have internal structure, in other words, they are made up of other, more fundamental particles. In an allusion to Finnegans Wake, scientists called these particles inside of protons and neutrons “quarks.” To the best of our knowledge, quarks are truly “fundamental,” in other words, we think there is nothing inside of them. These quarks are held together by another type of fundamental particle that we call a “gluon.” Over the last several decades, our understanding of this structure has improved tremendously. At the same time, we have come to realize that this structure is incredibly rich and with each answered question comes a host of new mysteries.<\/p>\n

One of the curious features exhibited by all subatomic particles including protons and their “constituent” quarks and gluons is that they act like tiny spinning tops. Since to the best of our knowledge quarks and gluons have nothing inside of them, this truly is an “intrinsic” property. It is knit into their very fabric. However, protons, are not fundamental. To the extent that protons behave as spinning tops, we should be able to describe the behavior as arising from the quarks and gluons that comprise these protons. Yet, initial ideas as to how the pieces of this puzzle fit together turned out to be spectacularly wrong, revealing sizable holes in our understanding of how the strong force works. Over the last two decades, STAR has been at the forefront of studying these mysteries, e.g. shedding light on the initially surprising role played by the gluon.<\/p>\n

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STAR Collaboration photo at the Fall 2017 Analysis Meeting at BNL. I am third to the right of the sign in the red and navy blue shirt.<\/p><\/div><\/a><\/p>\n

My Roles on STAR<\/h3>\n

I joined the STAR collaboration as a graduate student in 2005 and have been an active member ever since, participating in detector construction, analyzing the data they collect, and writing journal articles to publish the results. Over the last six years, I have served in leadership roles within the collaboration. The physics topics of STAR are divided into five general “working groups.” From 2014 to 2017, I served a three-year term as convener of the STAR Spin Physics Working Group, overseeing and organizing group research, chairing weekly conference calls and seasonal workshop meetings, presenting research on behalf of the group, reviewing and approving conference presentations, and helping to write journal publications. From 2017 to 2020, I served a three-year term on the STAR management team as one of the collaboration’s two deputy spokespersons. Other members of the management team during this time were the spokespersons Zhangbu Xu of BNL, Helen Caines of Yale University, and Frank Geurts of Rice University. In my role as deputy, I provided support and assistance to the spokespersons in the management of the experiment and collaboration, e.g. chairing committees and organizing collaboration meetings, and acted on their behalf to represent STAR, e.g. working with media and presenting to advisory committees and lab management. In 2015, I successfully applied to have Lamar University admitted to the STAR Collaboration as an associate member institution; and in 2018, I successfully applied to have ACU admitted to the collaboration as a full-member institution. Since the time, I have also served as ACU’s representative to the institutional council<\/a> that oversees collaboration governance.<\/p>\n

<<< Department Criteria for Scholarship<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The Collins Effect >>><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Throughout my time at Lamar and ACU, I have been an active member of the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) collaboration. STAR is a consortium of over 700 nuclear scientists from 68 institutions across 14 different countries. The STAR detectors … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17290,"featured_media":0,"parent":85,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"sidebar-page.php","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-570","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=570"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":768,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/570\/revisions\/768"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/85"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.acu.edu\/jimdrachenberg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}