Collisional Energy Loss of High Energy Particles - Margaret Stewart

Advisor: Dr. Fuqiang Wang

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory has collided Au nuclei at 200 GeV per nucleon.  Upon the collision of the two nuclei, many high energy particles are released.  However, experiments have observed fewer energetic particles than expected from theory.  This lead to the conclusion that a new state of matter called quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is created under these conditions.  One of the proposed scenarios is that the high energy particles collide with other particles in the QGP before reaching the detector, thus losing some of their energy.  In order to study this energy loss, we have created a computer program that uses conservation laws, relativistic kinematics, rotation of reference frames, and Lorentz transformations to simulate such collisions.  By running the simulation a large number of times, it is possible to study the probability distribution of both the scattering angles and the energy of the particle after one or several collisions.  That way, we hope to get a better understanding of why fewer high energy particles are detected during the experiments.