Heating up the Vacuum: a New Spin on QCD at RHIC

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Speaker(s): Kenneth N. Barish

Why are the proton’s constituents confined? Where does its mass come from?What makes up its spin?The theory of the strong force, QCD, has proven strikingly successful (e.g. this year’s Nobel Prize), however, so far it cannot be used to understand these fundamental questions. We have begun an experimental program at Brookhaven National Laboratory utilizing the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to explore these fundamental questions. In this talk I will motivate the RHIC physics program and discuss the latest experimental results.

Colloquium

Junior and senior physics majors attend our biweekly colloquium series, held on Tuesday afternoons at 4:30 p.m. in Shanahan B460. The talks are open to all students and to the public, and are frequently attended by scientists from the other Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, and others. The series features speakers from a broad range of institutions and fields of physics.