Highlights from the STAR experiment

TL;DR

This paper summarizes recent results from the STAR experiment at RHIC, exploring nuclear matter properties and phase transitions across a range of collision energies, including high baryon density regimes.

Contribution

It provides an overview of new experimental findings from STAR at various energies, highlighting advances in understanding nuclear matter phases.

Findings

Observation of phase transition signals at different energies

Evidence for high baryon density effects

New insights into nuclear matter properties

Abstract

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) studies properties and phase transitions of nuclear matter in various nucleus-nucleus collisions at center-of-mass energies per nucleon collision $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=7.7$-200 GeV. With a fixed target made of gold foils installed inside the beam pipe, STAR also starts to explore high baryon density regime ($\mu_B\approx420$-720 MeV) at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=3.0$-7.7 GeV. A few selected results reported by the STAR collaboration at the Quark Matter 2018 (QM2018) conference are described in these proceedings.