Innovative Calorimeter Technology and Particle Physics Discoveries at UCLA
Professor Huang, Experimental Nuclear Physics Group
The experimental nuclear physics group (Huang Lab) continues to play a major role in the Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC (STAR) experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. UCLA staff member Oleg Tsai led the construction of the Forward Calorimeter System (FCS) upgrade and the detector has been integrated into the STAR scientific program to measure high energy jets in the forward direction. The picture shows the front face of the FCS as viewed from the center of the STAR detector during the final installation.
The UCLA group is also a member of the newly constructed flagship experiment, sPHENIX, at RHIC. The run in 2023 was dedicated to detector commissioning for sPHENIX. Although work was interrupted in early August 2023 due to a helium leak in the RHIC accelerator complex, the sPHENIX detector commissioning will resume when RHIC operation starts in 2024.
The Tungsten Powder/Scintillating Fiber (W/ScFi) spaghetti ElectroMagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal) technology, developed by the UCLA group in the past decade, has a new application as a forward EMCal (fEMCal) in the ePIC experiment at Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Oleg Tsai serves as the technical coordinator of calorimeter detectors for the ePIC collaboration. The UCLA group will lead a collaborative team to design and build the fEMCal detector in the coming years. The EIC is a new national nuclear physics facility and the construction is expected to start in FY2026.
UCLA graduate students, Aditya Prasad Dash, Dylan Neff and Zhiwan Xu, presented their research results on behalf of the STAR Collaboration at the Quark Matter 2023 conference in Houston. Dylan received a Young Scientist Award in the student category by the conference organizers. Graduate students Brian Chan and Dylan Neff defended their thesis in September and October, respectively. Brian works as a data scientist at Seattle and Dylan took a post-doc position from CEA, Saclay in France. Zhiwan Xu was awarded the UCLA Dissertation Fellowship for AY2023-2024