sPHENIX is a collaboration, detector, and experiment proposed to succeed the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).

sPHENIX will measure jets, jet correlations and upsilons to determine the temperature dependence of transport coefficients and the color screening length in the QGP.

It will do this with high rate, large acceptance, hadronic and electromagnetic calorimetry and precision tracking. For jet and photon observables, sPHENIX will be able to sample half a trillion Au+Au events in 20 week RHIC run. It will have mass resolution sufficient to distinguish separately the three states of the upsilon family. The hadronic calorimetry will enable sPHENIX to trigger on jets in an unbiased fashion in p+p and p+Au and make unbiased measurements of jet observables in all systems.

Read the sPHENIX proposal here.

Our group is mainly involved in the design and realization of Streaming Readout, and other DAQ tasks. Streaming readout replaces the classical concept of a triggered readout with a more modern, software oriented solution. In a classical triggered system, the data conversion and storage is controlled by a an electrical signal, generated by hardware from a subset of detectors. This procedure must fulfill hard timing constraints.  In a streaming readout, the detector signals are continuously converted, and the decision what data to keep is moved to software, and can potentially be based on the full detector information, as time constraints are much relaxed, allowing to measure processes which have do produce a clean “trigger”-able signature in the fast detectors used for classic triggering.