Gabriel D. Rosenberg, The Wheatley School / Brookhaven National Laboratory, SUNY Stony BrookTitle: A Protocol for Sealing Kapton Windows for Use in the Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector of the PHENIX ProjectAuthors: G.D. Rosenberg (The Wheatley School); T.K. Hemmick (Brookhaven Lab, SUNY Stony Brook)Abstract: The PHENIX experiment was designed to identify and evaluate quark gluon plasma, a state of matter believed to have comprised the universe 1-20 microseconds after the Big Bang. Quark gluon plasma is the state of matter in which quarks move independently of one another over distances larger than a typical hadron size. The PHENIX detector, located on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, aims to identify quark gluon plasma by measuring particles produced during a collision of gold nuclei. Current estimates place the temperature necessary to form quark gluon plasma at roughly 150 MeV. The creation of quark gluon plasma will help resolve questions about the strong interaction, including quark deconfinement and the origin of mass. Quarks have previously only been observed in bound hadron states. It is also believed that at the same temperature, chiral symmetry will be restored in the system, thus leading to a greater understanding of the origin of mass in the universe. It is the aim of PHENIX to identify quark gluon plasma by studying particles other than the hadrons formed in the collision. Quarks composing hadrons quickly reconfine, thus masking any possibility of using these particles to identify quark gluon plasma. The Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector (RICH) of the PHENIX detector will measure electrons given off by the collision between gold nuclei. These electrons travel through a 0.002 inch thick Kapton window (DuPont) into a chamber of ethane gas. Subsequently produced Cherenkov radiation is focused using mirrors and detected by Photomultiplier Tubes (Hamamatsu Co., Japan). |