The goal of this project is the study of collisions between relativistic nuclei and ultimately the determination of the properties of nuclear matter over a wide range of temperatures and densities. Extremely hot or dense objects which are made of nuclear matter exist in the cosmos, however, without the possibility direct study of neutron stars, supernovae, or the Big Bang, one resorts to the challenging studies of finite and transient systems as provided by nucleus-nucleus collisions. It has become clear that in order to understand the nuclear equation of state or to identify a transistion to a new state of matter, the quark-gluon plasma, it will require a comprehensive and correlated set of measurements as well as extensive calculations which relate the observables to the nuclear matter variables. This project focuses on the acquisition and analysis of such a set of data using the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) located at Brookhaven National Laboratory. The collection of detector systems which make up the STAR experiment provide detailed information about individual collision events. The UCD group will use data from these detectors to reconstruct the events and infer, from the recorded debris, both the dynamics and the thermodynamics of the collision.
