THE RHIC-PROJECT AT BNL AND THE JAPANESE PARTICIPATION IN ITS RESEARCH PROGRAM
SATOSHI OZAKI
Construction of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the flagship nuclear physics research facility of the U.S. Department of Energy, is under way at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, NY, with commissioning of the collider scheduled in June 1999. With this collider, two counter-rotating beams of heavy ions, as heavy as those of gold, can be brought to head-on collisions at beam energies as high as 100 x A GeV, where A is the number of nucleons in each ion. (Because of a higher e/m ratio, energy of proton beams can reach 250 GeV.) The primary scientific objective of this collider, then, is to create globules of nuclear matter in extraordinary states of high temperature and high density; i.e., the quark-gluon plasma. The Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, the injector to RHIC, can accelerate polarized protons. Using this capability and with additional hardware contributed by RIKEN Institute of Japan, RHIC can also accelerate and collide spin polarized beams. One of the scientific objectives of such collisions is an investigation of the spin structure of nucleons. Four detectors are being constructed for the physics program at RHIC by highly international teams of scientists, engineers, and students. In particular, the Japanese presence in PHENIX, one of the four detectors, is very significant, both in terms of material contributions and intellectual leadership.
An overview and status of the construction and commissioning of the facility and the Japanese participation in its scientific program will be discussed.