An Upgrade Proposal from the PHENIX Collaboration

Understand

In this document the PHENIX collaboration proposes a major upgrade to the PHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

• This upgrade, sPHENIX, enables an extremely rich jet and beauty quarkonia physics program addressing fundamental questions about the nature of the strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP), discovered experimentally at RHIC to be a perfect fluid.
• The startling dynamics of the QGP on fluid-like length scales is an emergent property of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), seemingly implicit in the Lagrangian but stubbornly hidden from view.
• QCD is an asymptotically free theory, but how QCD manifests as a strongly coupled fluid with specific shear viscosity near $T_C$, as low as allowed by the uncertainty principle, is as fundamental an issue as that of how confinement itself arises.