The Nuclear Physics Group at Georgia State University is a member of sPHENIX Collaboration since its very beginning. The group (Xiaochun He, Murad Sarsour, and Megan Connors) played significant roles in building the sPHENIX Hadronic Calorimeter, called HCal, from GEANT4 simulation, prototyping studies, and detector constructions.
The group tested (main carried out by graduate and undergraduate students) over 13,000 scintillating tiles in the HCal lab at GSU from 2019 to 2021. These tiles were ordered from Uniplast Co in Russian and shipped to GSU for quality assurance test before shipping to BNL for detector assembly.
The sPHENIX is going to collecting data starting in Spring of 2023. The main physics interests of the group include jet measurements (including gamma, hadron, heavy flavor jets), heavy flavor physics, and Upsilon polarization properties in quark-gluon plasma (QGP) produced in gold nuclei collisions.