Highlights from BNL and RHIC 2014

Abstract

Highlights of news from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the period July 2013-June 2014 are presented. It was a busy year for news, most notably a U. S. Government shutdown for 16 days beginning October 1, 2013 due to the lack of an approved budget for FY2014. Even with this unusual government activity, the $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200$ GeV Au+Au Run14 at RHIC was the best ever with integrated luminosity exceeding the sum of all previous runs. Additionally there was a brief He$^3$+Au run to continue the study of collective flow in small systems which was reinforced by new results presented on identified particle flow in d+Au. The other scientific highlights are also mostly concerned with ``soft (low $p_T$)'' physics complemented by the first preliminary results of reconstructed jets from hard-scattered partons in Au+Au collisions at RHIC . The measurements of transverse energy ($E_T$) spectra in p-p, d+Au and Au+Au collisions, which demonstrated last year that constituent quarks are the fundamental elements of particle production in all 3 systems, led to the conclusion that the two-component ansatz which has been used to represent $E_T$ distributions as a function of centrality is simply a proxy for the number of constituent quark participants as well as to an explanation of the surprising elliptical flow results from U+U collisions. An extensive discussion of the latest measurements in Au+Au of net-charge and net-proton distributions represented by Cumulants of the distributions and plans for a Beam Energy Scan at RHIC to look for a QCD critical point is presented and compared to the claim implied by a press release during the 2011 ISSP.