BNL-CZ

Name: Brookhaven National Laboratory – participation of the Czech Republic

Institution: Czech Technical University in Prague

Coordinator: Mgr. Jaroslav Bielčík, Ph.D.; jaroslav.bielcik@fjfi.cvut.cz

Website

BNL-CZ facilitates access and supports the participation of Czech research teams in BNL (Brookhaven National Laboratory) in the USA. BNL is one of the largest multi-disciplinary laboratories in the world. High-energy heavy-ion collisions are an integral part of modern nuclear physics with importance for other fields, such as condensed matter physics, particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. BNL-CZ provides access to several world unique scientific instruments, BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), National Synchrotron Light Source and Brookhaven Linac Isotope Producer. Czech researchers have made significant contributions to experiments at RHIC in the exploration of nuclear matter, proton spin structures and research and development of new detector technologies. Therefore, one of the main goals of BNL-CZ is to enable access to the experimental facilities at RHIC, allowing the continuation of Czech participation in the STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX experiments, and taking part in the development, construction and operations of leading edge detectors. BNL-CZ also grants access to the RHIC Computing Facility – a large-scale computing centre used for analysing the data collected at RHIC. The local branch of BNL-CZ supports the development and maintenance of the computing cluster Sunrise at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The research program at BNL is fully complementary with the research carried out by CERN experiments. In the near future, the focus will be a detailed study of a nuclear matter phase diagram and the search for the critical point. In the long term, after completion of the heavy ion program, the construction of the new Electron Ion Collider will start in order to study the gluon structure of nuclear matter. BNL-CZ is also directly involved in broad international collaboration with the most prestigious laboratories, such as LBL (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory), LLNL (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and ANL (Argonne National Laboratory). In the European area, Czech researchers are intensively working in the development and testing of new detector technologies with research infrastructures FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Germany and High-Luminosity LHC (High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider) in CERN.