The Beam Energy Scan at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

Abstract

The Beam Energy Scan (BES) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is based on Au + Au collision data acquired between 2010 and 2014 at beam energies of = 7.7, 11.5, 14.5, 19.6, 27 and 39 GeV. These measurements constitute Phase-I of BES (also known as BES-I), and along with higher-energy data at 62.4 and 200 GeV, they allow the phase diagram of QCD matter to be probed. BES-I has three physics goals: investigation of a turning-off of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) signatures that are by now well established at higher energies, the search for a possible first-order phase transition between hadronic and QGP phases, and the search for a possible critical point. Several promising signals have been reported, but since RHIC luminosity decreases steeply as the beam energy is scanned down, statistical errors are excessively large at the lower BES-I energies where potentially novel phenomena are observed. In 2019 and 2020, BES-II will take data with large improvements in both RHIC luminosity and in detector performance.