STAR detector

[1][2][3] The primary scientific objective of STAR is to study the formation and characteristics of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), a state of matter believed to exist at sufficiently high energy densities.

Unlike other physics experiments where a theoretical prediction can be tested directly by a single measurement, STAR must make use of a variety of simultaneous studies in order to draw strong conclusions about the QGP.

These detectors work together in an advanced data acquisition and subsequent physics analysis that allows definitive statements to be made about the collision.

In today's cool universe, quarks and gluons are confined and exist only within composite particles (bound states) – the hadrons, such as protons and neutrons.

This allows to extract the transport coefficients that characterize the quark-gluon matter, including the shear and bulk viscosity, and to investigate macroscopic quantum phenomena, such as the chiral magnetic effect.