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A Knowledge Innovation Project of Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) “STAR Relativistic Heavy-ion Physics Research and Time-Of-Flight Detector R&D” engaged by Center of Particle Physics and Technology (under Grant No. KJCX2-YW-A14) has passed the closeout review chaired by CAS academician ZHANG Huanqiao on February 24. Prof. WANG Xiaolian, on behalf of the research team from the High-energy Physics Group, presented MRPC mass production, quality assurance, quality control, TOF calibration, particle identification method and TOF related physics, collected lots of compliments.
Through this project, the project team successfully designed the Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chambers (MRPC) based Time-Of-Flight detector for the RHIC-STAR experiment, located at Brookhaven National Laboratory at Upton, New York, US. 4032 MRPC modules has been produced and installed. The performance is better than the experiment requirement. The STAR-TOF is the first operating large TOF using MRPC technology, it significantly enhanced STAR particle identification capability. In particularly, it enables STAR to identify low transverse momentum electron for the first time. In addition, through this project, the research team also achieved plenty of important physics results. For example, the first observation of an antimatter hypernuclear which is published on SCIENCE magazine and among the top 10 Chinese Science Progress in 2010 and Brookhaven National Lab's top 5 scientific discoveries of 2010.
A team with significant amount of young scientists is formed with this project, especially a bunch of excellent graduate students are trained, 3 of them has become convener of physics working group within STAR and PHENIX international collaboration.
This is a China-US joint program, it also passed the US Department of Energy closeout review successfully, the committee thought this is a big success of the cooperation between Chinese and US high-energy nuclear physics.
All of the members from the committee formed by CAS scored this project A, the committee also recommended CAS continuously support the project team. |