BNL-CZ – website
Participation of the Czech Republic
Hosting institution: Czech Technical University in Prague
Partner institutions:
The BNL-CZ facilitates access and supports participation of the Czech research community in the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in the United States. The 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. The BNL-CZ provides access to several world unique scientific instruments, the BNL’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), National Synchrotron Light Source and Brookhaven Linac Isotope Producer. Significant contributions in experiments at RHIC have been made by the Czech researchers in exploration of the nuclear matter, proton spin structure and research and development of new detector technologies. Therefore, one of the main goals of the BNL-CZ is to facilitate future access to experimental facilities at RHIC, allowing continuation of the Czech participation in the STAR and PHENIX experiments, in the preparation of the sPHENIX experiment as well as taking part in development, construction and operation of the leading edge detectors. The BNL-CZ also grants the access to the “RHIC Computing Facility” – a large-scale computing centre used for analyses of data collected at RHIC. The local part of the BNL-CZ supports development and maintenance of the computing cluster Sunrise at the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and Physical Engineering of the Czech Technical University in Prague. The research programme of the BNL is fully complementary to the research programmes carried by the CERN experiments.
Future development
The experimental programme at the RHIC has perspective for many years ahead. The current and future upgrades of the STAR and PHENIX experiments will further strengthen the scientific goals of the BNL. In short term the scientific focus will be on the detailed study of nuclear matter phase diagram and search of critical point. In medium term, we focus on proton spin related programme and precision measurements of cold nuclear matter effects. The new experiment sPHENIX will be completed in order to further study jet properties and heavy flavour quarks. In the long term, after finishing of heavy-ion programme, the construction of an Electron Ion Collider will start in order to study gluon structure of nuclear matter.
Socio-economic impact
The BNL has developed a very strong cooperation with commercial sector. Similarly also the BNL-CZ has a strong potential for commercial applications that is related to the Centre of applied physics and advanced detection systems located at the Czech Technical University in Prague. The laboratory specializes in development of silicon sensors and read-out chips using deep submicron technology and it has developed a very good cooperation with international community interested in detector R&D.
