Whole lotta building goin' on

This summer an intrepid team of graduate and undergraduate students is assembling in Urbana giant aluminum "wheels" that will hold the resistive plate counter (RPC) detector components for an upgraded trigger of the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Supervised by Professor Matthias Grosse Perdekamp, the three UI graduate students (Martin Leitgab, Scott Wolin, and Cameron McKinney), undergraduate students (Alex Burnap, George Deinlein, and Jason Strack), two technicians (Eric Thorsland and John Blackburn), and two REU summer students (Zarah Ahmad, Southeast Missouri State University, and Justine Ide, Muhlenberg College) are assembling the half-octant structures.

Shown assembling one of the half-octant detector-wheel assemblies in the Nuclear Physics Laboratory at the University of Illinois are, from left, Cameron McKinney, Alex Burnap, Scott Wolin, George Deinlein, and Justine Ide.

Nearly 5 tons of aluminum parts were delivered to the University of Illinois from Hi-Tech Manufacturing, Chicago, Illinois, on May 12.  The assembly of the first 16 half-octant structures was completed on Tuesday, June 2.  By Friday, June 5, the half-octants were assembled into a full detector wheel.  The wheels will be used to hold the active RPC modules in PHENIX.

The first 16 half-octants will be shipped to Brookhaven National Laboratory on June 17, where they will be equipped with the RPC detector modules and then installed in the PHENIX detector.  The final 16 half-octants will be delivered to Brookhaven by mid-July.

About PHENIX

PHENIX is a complex instrument that consists of different particle detectors that have been designed specifically to probe the reaction products of heavy-ion and polarized proton-proton collisions at RHIC. The PHENIX detector systems are grouped into two central spectrometer arms, which are capable of measuring a variety of particles, including pions, protons, kaons, deuterons, photons, and electrons, and two muon spectrometer arms, which measure muons.

The PHENIX collaboration, which includes about 500 physicists and engineers from 69 institutions in 14 countries, engages in a broad program of studying QCD phenomena at RHIC, including the physics of heavy ion collisions, the spin-dependent structure of the proton in polarized proton-proton collisions, and the study of nucleon structure in a nuclear environment in proton- or deuteron-ion collisions.

Grosse Perdekamp has led the development of a state-of-the-art trigger system for PHENIX to measure the flavor structure of the quark and anti-quark polarizations in the proton using a novel technique: the observation of W bosons in polarized proton-proton collisions.

In addition to the exploration of proton spin structure, the main goal of PHENIX is the discovery and study of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP is a state of matter with free quarks and gluons that is believed to have existed ten-millionths of a second after the big bang, just before quarks and gluons started to form protons and neutrons—the fundamental building blocks of atomic nuclei.

About Matthias Grosse Perdekamp

Grosse Perdekamp received his diplom in physics from Freiburg University in 1990, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1995. He was an associate research scientist at Yale University from 1995 to 1998, and a research scientist at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, from 1998 to 1999. He was a RIKEN Fellow at RHIC from 1999 to 2002, when he joined the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois.

About the Nuclear Physics Group at Illinois

The Department of Physics at the University of Illinois has been a world leader in nuclear physics for more than 70 years.  The research program of the Nuclear Physics Laboratory (NPL) at Illinois today focuses on the physics in two broad themes: the structure and interations of protons and neutrons and the search for new physics beyond the standard model.

The faculty and research faculty members of the NPL group include, in addition to Grosse Perdekamp, Douglas H. Beck, Paul Debevec, David W. Hertzog, Peter Kammel, Naomi C.R. Makins, Alan M. Nathan, Jen-Chieh Peng, and Steve Williamson.

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation under grants #0521542 and #0601067.