This three-year award will support the research of a faculty member, a postdoctoral fellow, and a graduate students to participate in a program in relativistic heavy-ion research at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). The experiment is studying the flow of nuclear matter following Au-Au collisions at various energies up to 10 GeV per nucleon. The study of the high-density nuclear matter in these collisions offers the possibility to determine the equation of state for nuclear matter and possibly (although unlikely at these energies) the discovery of a new state of matter, the quark- gluon plasma. The PI is also a member of the STAR collaboration for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) effort at BNL, which is scheduled to begin collecting data in September, 1999. This grant will support the development of tracking software for the Silicon Vertex Tracker and extend it to integrate it with the existing tracking software developed for the STAR Time Projection Chamber.
