Physics Goals

The primary goal of PHENIX is to detect the quark-gluon plasma and to characterize its physical properties. PHENIX offers the possibility to study probes from different stages of the collisions, for instance:

• jets from initial hard scattering processes
• direct photons and lepton pairs
• decays of mesons, such as J/$\Psi$ and $\phi$
• HBT correlations

Temperature and energy density of the system can be varied by changing beam energy and nuclear species. For instance, p-p and p-A collisions give information on purely hadronic effects, which may distort the potential QGP signals.

A second goal of PHENIX is to study the spin structure of the nucleon. For this purpose RHIC accelerates beams of polarized protons.