The research to be carried out with the present NSF funding by the Ohio State University Relativistic Heavy Ion group is to carry out experimental studies of high-energy heavy-ion and proton collisions at both the RHIC and LHC facilities with the STAR and ALICE experiments, respectively. The main emphasis will be to use the method of Hanbury-Brown-Twiss interferometry to extract space-time information from these collisions using identical boson pairs such as pion and kaon pairs. Using models developed by the investigators this experimental information will be related to the dynamics of the collision to help determine the mechanism of hadronization in these collisions, which might serve as a signature for exotic processes such as Quark Matter formation.
The broader impacts of this research are mainly 1) to train young scientists in the methods of large-scale collaborative research, and 2) to further the methods of large-scale grid computing to carry out data analysis on large data sets.
