An Upgrade Proposal from the PHENIX Collaboration

TL;DR

The paper proposes a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector, called sPHENIX, to enable advanced studies of the quark-gluon plasma and its properties, addressing fundamental questions in quantum chromodynamics.

Contribution

It introduces the sPHENIX upgrade, enhancing the detector's capabilities for jet and quarkonia physics to explore QGP properties.

Findings

Enhanced detector capabilities for jet physics

Potential to elucidate QGP fluid properties

New insights into QCD confinement mechanisms

Abstract

In this document the PHENIX collaboration proposes a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. This upgrade, sPHENIX, enables an extremely rich jet and beauty quarkonia physics program addressing fundamental questions about the nature of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), discovered experimentally at RHIC to be a perfect fluid. The startling dynamics of the QGP on fluid-like length scales is an emergent property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), seemingly implicit in the Lagrangian but stubbornly hidden from view. QCD is an asymptotically free theory, but how QCD manifests as a strongly coupled fluid with specific shear viscosity near $T_C$, as low as allowed by the uncertainty principle, is as fundamental an issue as that of how confinement itself arises.