Studying the Quark Gluon Plasma at RHIC.

Helen Caines (Yale)

One of the key goals in the field of high-energy nuclear physics is to understand the properties of matter created at temperatures of 2 x 10¹² K, several thousand times that at the center of the sun. This matter, known as the Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), has partonic degrees of freedom and is believed to have dominated at very early times in the Universe. Early results obtained from the experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory showed that the QGP can also be created in lab. In this talk I will focus on recent jet studies from the STAR experiment at RHIC that probe how high energy quarks and gluons interact with this hot and dense medium which in turn teaches us about its properties.