Highlights from BNL and RHIC 2014

TL;DR

The paper summarizes key scientific results from BNL and RHIC in 2013-2014, highlighting advances in collision experiments, particle flow, jet reconstruction, and QCD critical point searches amidst a challenging government shutdown period.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent experimental findings at RHIC, including new results on collective flow, jet reconstruction, and QCD critical point search strategies.

Findings

Best Au+Au run with record luminosity

First preliminary reconstructed jet results in Au+Au collisions

Evidence supporting constituent quarks as fundamental in particle production

Abstract

Highlights of news from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the period July 2013-June 2014 are presented. It was a busy year for news, most notably a U. S. Government shutdown for 16 days beginning October 1, 2013 due to the lack of an approved budget for FY2014. Even with this unusual government activity, the $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV Au+Au Run14 at RHIC was the best ever with integrated luminosity exceeding the sum of all previous runs. Additionally there was a brief He$^3$+Au run to continue the study of collective flow in small systems which was reinforced by new results presented on identified particle flow in d+Au. The other scientific highlights are also mostly concerned with ``soft (low $p_T$)'' physics complemented by the first preliminary results of reconstructed jets from hard-scattered partons in Au+Au collisions at RHIC . The measurements of transverse energy ($E_T$) spectra in p-p, d+Au and Au+Au collisions, which demonstrated last year that constituent quarks are the fundamental elements of particle production in all 3 systems, led to the conclusion that the two-component ansatz which has been used to represent $E_T$ distributions as a function of centrality is simply a proxy for the number of constituent quark participants as well as to an explanation of the surprising elliptical flow results from U+U collisions. An extensive discussion of the latest measurements in Au+Au of net-charge and net-proton distributions represented by Cumulants of the distributions and plans for a Beam Energy Scan at RHIC to look for a QCD critical point is presented and compared to the claim implied by a press release during the 2011 ISSP.