First results from RHIC-PHENIX
Abstract
The PHENIX experiment consists of a large detector system located at the newly com-missioned relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The primarygoal of the PHENIX experiment is to look for signatures of the QCD prediction of a deconfinedhigh-energy-density phase of nuclear matter quark gluon plasma. PHENIX started data taking forAu+Au collisions atpsNN=130GeV in June 2000. The signals from the beam-beam counter(BBC) and zero degree calorimeter (ZDC) are used to determine the centrality of the collision. AGlauber model reproduces the ZDC spectrum reasonably well to determine the participants in a col-lision. Charged particle multiplicity distribution from the first PHENIX paper is compared with theother RHIC experiment and the CERN, SPS results. Transverse momentum of photons are measuredin the electro-magnetic calorimeter (EMCal) and preliminary results are presented. Particle identifi-cation is made by a time of flight (TOF) detector and the results show clear separation of the chargedhadrons from each other.