Seminar in Hadronic Physics

The Heavy Flavor Tracker at STAR: Performance and current status

Michael Lomnitz

Kent State University

Heavy Ion collisions at RHIC provide a unique environment to study several aspects of the behavior of nuclear matter. In particular, heavy quarks provide an exceptional probe in understanding the hot and dense medium produced during the early stages of a collision.

The Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT) upgrade for the STAR experiment at RHIC has been successfully installed and the whole system was included for the first time during Run14. 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 of silicon, the Silicon Strip Detector (SSD) and Intermediate Silicon Tracker (IST).

An overview of the physics goals together with the HFT's current status and preliminary studies of the systems performance during Run 14 will be presented.