Last couple of weeks have been hectic. Almost everybody from LANL PHENIX group was at Brookhaven National Laboratory, as we had to make presentations for the Forward Vertex Upgrade project to the PHENIX management. If this project gets approved by PHENIX management it shall go the Brookhaven National Lab management and then eventually to the DOE (Department of Energy which funds a lot of nuclear physics in US). A cutaway of this proposed detector upgrade is shown below:
The Forward Vertex Upgrade project (FVTX) aims to use silicon sensors to detect "open" charm (and bottom) by looking at displaced vertices from D meson decays. These heavy quarks can be an important probe for studying the properties of the QGP (Quark Gluon Plasma). So towards this project I have been doing a lot of simulation studies as well doing FPGA programming to set up the interface of the sensors and the read out chips with the PHENIX DAQ (data acquistion system).
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