封面图片 2010年, 第5卷 第2期
The Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory was the first one that consisted of two independent rings. It was designed to operate at high luminosity over a wide range of beam energies and with particle species ranging from polarized proton to heavy ions. From central gold-gold collisions at the top center-of-mass energy of 200 GeV per nucleon-nucleon pair, thousands of particles were produced (see cover figure). With several years of data taking, it was concluded that RHIC had created a strongly interacting, hot and dense matter with partonic degrees of freedom - the Quark Gluon Plasma. Such a matter is believed to have existed for a few microseconds after the big bang. The goal of the second phase of RHIC is to understand the properties of the matter, such as its colored degrees of freedom and its equation of state. The physics of RHIC is reviewed by Dr. Li-juan RUAN (阮丽娟) in the article"Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) physics overview" , pp 205-214. [Photo credits: the STAR Collaboration, Brookhaven National Laboratory, USA][展开] ...