Big Success of the Cooperation between Chinese and US High-Energy Nuclear Physics

On Mar 22, STAR Relativistic Heavy-ion Physics Research and Time-Of-Flight Detector R&D project team got informed that it got All A s score in the closeout review chaired by CAS academician ZHANG Huanqiao on Feb 24. The committee also recommended CAS continuously support the project team.

This is a China-US joint program, it also passed the US Department of Energy closeout review successfully, the committee thought this is a big success of the cooperation between Chinese and US high-energy nuclear physics.

STAR Detector diagrammatic section/Project Team	A TOF tray made with 32 MRPC modules/Project Team

The project team successfully designed the Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) based Time-Of-Flight detector for the RHIC-STAR experiment, located at Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, US. 4032 MRPC modules has been produced and installed. The performance is better than the experiment requirement.

The STAR-TOF is the first operating large TOF using MRPC technique, it significantly enhanced STAR particle identification capability. In particularly, it enables STAR to identify low transverse momentum electron for the first time. In addition, through this project, the research team also achieved plenty of important physics results.

For example, the first observation of an antimatter hypernuclear which is published on SCIENCE magazine and among the top 10 Chinese Science Progress in 2010 and Brookhaven National Lab s top 5 scientific discoveries of 2010.

STAR Relativistic Heavy-ion Physics Research and Time-Of-Flight Detector R&D is A Knowledge Innovation Project of Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) engaged by Center of Particle Physics and Technology (under Grant No. KJCX2-YW-A14). A team with significant amount of young scientists is formed with this project, especially a bunch of excellent graduate students are trained, 3 of them has become convener of physics working group within STAR and PHENIX international collaboration.

In the February review, Prof. WANG Xiaolian of USTC, on behalf of the research team from the High-energy Physics Group, presented MRPC mass production, quality assurance, quality control, TOF calibration, particle identification method and TOF related physics, collected lots of compliments.

A workshop on STAR MTD Production and Related Physics will be held on March 30th - April 1st, 2011, Hefei, Anhui, China. To know More information, please visit the website: http://hepg.ustc.edu.cn/MTD2011/index.html

(School of Physical Science of USTC, News Center of USTC)