Heavy Flavor and Quarkonia Physics at sPHENIX

Abstract

The sPHENIX detector, being constructed at BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), will begin measuring a plethora of Heavy Flavor and Quarkonia observables with unprecedented statistics and kinematic reach at RHIC energies starting in 2023. This includes the largest recorded sample of b-flavored hadron decays from Heavy Ion collisions at RHIC, allowing for precise probes of the QGP using charm and beauty quarks. These measurements are enabled by the excellent vertexing of the MAPS-based micro-VerTeX detector (MVTX), timing of the INTermediate silicon strip Tracker (INTT), precision tracking by the Time Projection Chamber (TPC), and the ElectroMagnetic and Hadronic Calorimetry systems (EMCal and HCal, respectively), the latter of which is deployed for the first time at RHIC. The sPHENIX collaboration has created the reconstruction software stack as well as realistic data simulations, which allow for testing and optimization of the software and physics selections.