{"id":218274,"date":"2025-07-19T02:18:35","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/first-physics-results-from-the-sphenix-particle-detector"},"modified":"2025-07-19T02:18:35","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T07:18:35","slug":"first-physics-results-from-the-sphenix-particle-detector","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/07\/first-physics-results-from-the-sphenix-particle-detector","title":{"rendered":"First physics results from the sPHENIX particle detector"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/first-physics-results-from-the-sphenix-particle-detector2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bnl.gov\/rhic\/sphenix.php\" target=\"_blank\">sPHENIX<\/a> particle detector, the newest experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bnl.gov\/rhic\/\" target=\"_blank\">RHIC<\/a>) at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has released its first physics results: precision measurements of the number and energy density of thousands of particles streaming from collisions of near-light-speed gold ions.<\/p>\n<p>As described in two papers recently accepted for publication in <i>Physical Review C<\/i> and the <i>Journal of High Energy Physics<\/i>, these measurements lay the foundation for the <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/detector\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">detector<\/a>\u2019s detailed exploration of the quark\u2013gluon plasma (QGP), a unique state of matter that existed just microseconds after the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. Both studies are available on the <i>arXiv<\/i> preprint server.<\/p>\n<p>The new measurements reveal that the more head-on the nuclear smashups are, the more charged particles they produce and the more total energy those firework-like sprays of particles carry. That matches nicely with results from other detectors that have tracked QGP-generating collisions at RHIC since 2000, confirming that the new detector is performing as promised.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The sPHENIX particle detector, the newest experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has released its first physics results: precision measurements of the number and energy density of thousands of particles streaming from collisions of near-light-speed gold ions. As described in two papers recently [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218274","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218274","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218274"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218274\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218274"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218274"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218274"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}