College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

PHENIX

Physics' Marzia Rosati has played a major role in a research project at the Brookhaven National Laboratory.
The collaboration consists of more than 430 physicists and engineers from 43 participating institutions in 11 countries. Scientists from Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Russian, Sweden and the United States are all involved.

Marzia Rosati, assistant professor of physics and astronomy, has been involved with the PHENIX collaboration from the very beginning.

"After I finished my Ph.D., I was offered a post-doc at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York," Rosati said. "It was a slightly different field than I was in, but it was brand new area of high energy physics.

"It was an opportunity to do something completely new."

PHENIX is a very large detector system that is designed to detect, identify and measure the momentum of each of the many different kinds of particles produced at Brookhaven’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). PHENIX comprises three electromagnets, four instrumented spectrometers or arms, and two inner detector systems.

"The experiment was developed to answer two of the outstanding questions of fundamental science," Rosati said. "What happened during the first few moments of the early universe? And, how does the proton get its spin?

"PHENIX looks deep into the source of RHIC physics to learn about the earliest times of quark gluon plasma formation in heavy-ion collisions, and to uncover the secrets of the spin structure of the proton in polarized proton collisions."

When she first began work on PHENIX, Rosati estimates that she spent only about 20 percent of her time on the project, but that "she played a big role in the design of the detector system."

She has made major contributions to both the E910 experiment at Brookhaven's AGS accelerator and the PHENIX collaboration. Rosati has played a significant role in constructing the time expansion chambers (TEC) and developing the software needed to analyze the TEC data. Her accomplishments are evidenced by 46 publications, including 20 since coming to Iowa State in 1997.

"I'm very familiar with every aspect of the experiment because I was in on the project at the beginning," she said. "It makes me fairly effective when it comes time to look at data that is related to my research."

Rosati's field of research is experimental nuclear physics, focusing on relativistic heavy ion collisions, which helped her earn a LAS Award for Early Excellence in Research/Artistic Creativity last spring.

A new high statistics data set began with the PHENIX experiment last August, requiring her to spend three-week blocks of time at the national laboratory helping coordinate the data collection.

"The PHENIX experiment is a very complex system," she said. "Most of the individuals who have worked on the project are usually experts on one area. I have actually worked on three different areas."

That's because immediately after finishing her post-doc at Brookhaven, Rosati was an assistant physicist in experimental heavy ion physics at the same national laboratory. It was during this time that the PHENIX experiment was developed.