STAR:
Particle Production in the Big Bang
The Crawford group has the responsibility for designing and building the trigger for the STAR experiment (the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC)
at the new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The goal of the experiment is to investigate particle
production from an environment similar in energy density to the early stages of the universe. Beams of nuclei collide every 110 ns and the
trigger detectors must be read-out and analyzed at this rate. A fully pipelined system has been designed and implemented.
The Crawford group has been working closely with various physics interest groups within STAR. We concentrate on the
analysis of rare signals, including multi-hyper nuclei and multiply-strange baryons. We use STAR to analyze Cosmic Ray backgrounds
relevant to the two-photon program, perhaps observing air showers periodically. We also use STAR in a free quark search mode.
For information on how the STAR Trigger works, click on the thumbnails above.
The first describes the Trigger and the STAR Collaboration's search for the Quark Gluon Plasma. The second describes the STAR experiment's
various detectors. The third describes the Trigger decision making and implementation.
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