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High-energy nuclear physics studies the behaviour of nuclear matter in energy regimes typical of high energy physics. The primary focus of this field is the study of heavy-ion collisions, as compared to lower atomic mass atoms in other particle accelerators. At sufficient collision energies, these types of collisions are theorized to produce the quark–gluon plasma. In peripheral nuclear collisions at high energies one expects to obtain information on the electromagnetic production of leptons and mesons which are not accessible in electron-positron colliders due to their much smaller luminosities. Previous high-energy nuclear accelerator experiments have studied heavy-ion collisions using projectile energies of 1 GeV/nucleon up to 158 GeV/nucleon. Experiments of this type, called "fixed target" experiments, primarily accelerate a "bunch" of ions (typically around to ions per bunch) to speeds approaching the speed of light (0.999c) and smash them into a target of similar heavy ions. While all collision systems are interesting, great focus was applied in the late 1990s to symmetric collision systems of gold beams on gold targets at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) and uranium beams on uranium targets at CERN's Super Proton Synchrotron. Currently, high-energy nuclear physics experiments are being conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and in CERN's new Large Hadron Collider. The four primary experiments at RHIC (PHENIX, STAR, PHOBOS, and BRAHMS) study collisions of highly relativistic nuclei. Unlike fixed target experiments, collider experiments steer two accelerated beams of ions toward each other at (in the case of RHIC) six interaction regions. At RHIC, ions can be accelerated (depending on the ion size) from 100 GeV/nucleon to 250GeV/nucleon. Since each colliding ion possesses this energy moving in opposite directions, the maximum energy of the collisions can achieve a center of mass collision energy of 200GeV/nucleon for gold and 500GeV/nucleon for protons. The ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) detector at the LHC at CERN is specialized in studying Pb-Pb nuclei collisions at a centre of mass energy of 2.76 TeV per nucleon pair. Other LHC detectors like CMS, ATLAS, and LHCb also have heavy ion programs. ==History== The exploration of hot hadron matter and of multiparticle production has a long history initiated by theoretical work on multiparticle production by Enrico Fermi in the USA, and Lev Landau in the USSR. These efforts paved the way to the development in the early sixties of the statistical bootstrap model description of hadron production by Rolf Hagedorn. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「High energy nuclear physics」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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