A reaction plane detector for PHENIX at RHIC

• DOI: 10.1016/j.nima.2011.01.034
• Publication Date: 2011-01-20T04:31:03Z
• Authors: E. Richardson; Y. Akiba; N. Anderson; A.A. Bickley; T. Chujo; B.A. Cole; S. Esumi; J.S. Haggerty; J. Hanks; T.K. Hemmick; M. Hutchison; Y. Ikeda; M. Inaba; J. Jia; D. Lynch; Y. Miake; A.C. Mignerey; T. Niida; E. O’Brien; R. Pak; M. Shimomura; P.W. Stankus; T. Todoroki; K. Watanabe; R. Wei; W. Xie; W.A. Zajc; C. Zhang
• Keywords: Pseudorapidity; Time projection chamber; SIGNAL (programming language)

28 authors from 10 institutions, 24 pages, 16 figures and 3 tables. Published in Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A<br/>A plastic scintillator paddle detector with embedded fiber light guides and photomultiplier tube readout, referred to as the Reaction Plane Detector (RXNP), was designed and installed in the PHENIX experiment prior to the 2007 run of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The RXNP's design is optimized to accurately measure the reaction plane (RP) angle of heavy-ion collisions, where, for mid-central $\sqrt{s_{NN}}$ = 200 GeV Au+Au collisions, it achieved a $2^{nd}$ harmonic RP resolution of $\sim$0.75, which is a factor of $\sim$2 greater than PHENIX's previous capabilities. This improvement was accomplished by locating the RXNP in the central region of the PHENIX experiment, where, due to its large coverage in pseudorapidity ($1.0<br/>