Seminar in Hadronic Physics

STAR Heavy Flavor Tracker: Physics goals and status

Michael Lomnitz

Kent State University

The Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) upgrade for the STAR experiment at RHIC is nearing completion with the aim of studying heavy quark production. In relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC, heavy quarks are primarily produced through initial hard scattering and due to their high masses they are influenced less by interactions with the QCD medium. This makes them an ideal candidate to probe the dynamics of the system at these early stages.

The HFT will study heavy quarks through topological reconstruction of open charm hadrons and consists of three sub-modules: a two layer inner Pixel vertex detector and two outer layers, the Silicon Strip Detector (SSD) and Intermediate Silicon Tracker (IST). An overview of HFT, analysis of 2013 Pixel prototype beam tests and current status will be presented.