Highlights from the STAR experiment at RHIC

Abstract

We present an overview of results presented by the STAR collaboration at the Quark Matter 2017 conference. We report the precision measurement of elliptic flow of D0 mesons and the first measurement of Λc baryons in Au+Au collisions at sNN=200GeV, which suggest thermalization of charm quarks. B-hadron production is also measured via the decay daughters, J/ψ, D0 and electrons in Au+Au collisions, exhibiting less suppression than charm mesons at high transverse momenta (pT) for the D0 and electron decay channels. J/ψ and ϒ measurements provide new insights into in-medium regeneration and dissociation. Di-electron production shows evidence for coherent photo-production at very low pT. The first RHIC measurement of direct photon-jet coincidences is reported, and compared to distributions with π0 and charged hadron triggers. The jet shared momentum fraction zg measurement shows no modification in A+A collisions, in contrast to LHC measurements. First results from the fixed-target program at STAR show good agreement with published results. New analysis methods of the chiral magnetic effect are discussed, together with the first observation of a non-zero global Λ polarization in A+A collisions. Finally, we give an outlook to detector upgrades for the Beam Energy Scan phase II.