Artn Artists - Ellen Sandor, Fernando Orellana, Eric Ravenstein, Nichole Maury, Stephan Meyers and Janine Fron Collaborative Artists - Craig Tull, Doug Fritz, and James Osborn, National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Herb Ward, University of Texas at Austin Size - 30x30 Medium - Virtual Photograph Materials - Duratrans, Kodalith, Plexiglas Collection - (art)n National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, E.O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Description - STAR is a large (5.2 meter diameter) nuclear physics detector at RHIC exploring the behavior of strongly interacting nuclear matter at high energy density. STAR's flagship project within a rich and varied nuclear physics program is the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma. The QGP is a state of matter which is predicted by the standard model of particle physics (Quantum Chromodynamics) to have existed ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang (origin of the Universe) and may still exist today in the cores of very dense stars. Shown here is 5% of a simulated gold on gold nuclear collision at the center of the STAR detector illustrating the complexity of a typical event. Because of the tremendous data quantities that STAR and other modern HENP experiments produce, High Energy & Nuclear Physics experiments are stressing the state of the art in managing, accessing, and analyzing hundreds of Terabytes of data per year. NERSC experts in HENP and data intensive computing are helping to expand the current state of the art to provide these experiments with tools which allow scientists to investigate these new physics regimes. Back to large image