Engineering Papers⌕ Search

SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “sPHENIX”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 37 records · Page 2

Measurement of the transverse energy density in Measurement of the transverse energy density in Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{𝑠_{𝑁⁢𝑁}}$ = 200 GeV with the sPHENIX detector

Here, this paper reports measurements of the transverse energy per unit pseudorapidity (𝑑⁢𝐸 𝑇 /𝑑⁢𝜂) produced in Au + Au collisions at $\sqrt{𝑠_{𝑁⁢𝑁}}$ = 200 GeV, performed with the sPHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). The results cover the pseudorapidity range |𝜂| < 1.1 and constitute the first such measurement performed using a hadronic calorimeter at RHIC. Measurements of 𝑑⁢𝐸 𝑇 /𝑑⁢𝜂 are presented for a range of centrality intervals and the average 𝑑⁢𝐸 𝑇 /𝑑⁢𝜂 as a function of the number of participating nucleons, 𝑁 part , is compared to a variety of Monte Carlo heavy-ion event generators. The results are in agreement with previous measurements at RHIC, and feature an improved granularity in 𝜂 and improved precision in low-𝑁 part events.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

A demonstrator for a real-time AI-FPGA-based triggering system for sPHENIX at RHIC

The RHIC interaction rate at sPHENIX will reach around 3 MHz in pp collisions and requires the detector readout to reject events by a factor of over 200 to fit the DAQ bandwidth of 15 kHz. Some critical measurements, such as heavy flavor production in pp collisions, often require the analysis of particles produced at low momentum. This prohibits adopting the traditional approach, where data rates are reduced through triggering on rare high momentum probes. We explore a new approach based on real-time AI technology, adopt an FPGA-based implementation using a custom designed FELIX-712 board with the Xilinx Kintex Ultrascale FPGA, and deploy the system in the detector readout electronics loop for real-time trigger decision.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Intelligent experiments through real-time AI: Fast Data Processing and Autonomous Detector Control for sPHENIX and future EIC detectors (Phase-I)

With an ever increasing demand for high precision data from modern detectors for discovery science and precision measurements, all major high energy nuclear and particle experiments, current and future, are facing the challenge on how to deal with the large volume of raw data generated from sophisticated state-of-the-art detectors in high rate collisions. These goals need to be balanced with available hardware and cost limits on DAQ (Data AcQuisition system) bandwidth and offline computing resources to capture, store and process the signal events. Two prototypical examples are the upcoming sPHENIX experiment, the DOE next generation heavy ion physics experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at BNL, and the future EIC experiments that are planned to be online circa 2030.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗

sPHENIX heavy flavor jet tagging studies in p+p at $\sqrt{s_{NN}}=200~GeV$

Heavy-flavor jets, which are initiated from heavy quarks, are ideal probes for studying flavor dependent parton energy loss. We report on the performance of jet flavor tagging using two Neural Network Machine Learning (ML) models: the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model and an Attention-based Neural Network, in simulations of 200 GeV p + p collisions. The tagging performance of bottom quark initiated jets with both ML models surpasses that of the traditional cut-based method. Technical details, including sample and kinematic variable selections, the machine learning training and testing setup with parameter tuning, and outcome comparisons, will be discussed.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗

Space Charge Simulations of High Intensity Proton Beams in the AGS Booster

Computer simulation studies have been performed to understand the beam behavior and to explore intensity limitations of proton beams in the AGS Booster at higher beam intensities. During the 100 GeV polarized proton operations of RHIC Run 2024, sPHENIX operated in modes with a crossing angle at collisions in order to mitigate beam-beam effects. Three different running modes were employed: (a) sPHENIX operated with a negative (-2 mrad) crossing angle, and STAR operated with 0 mrad. Both experiments were brought into collisions at the start of the store. (b) sPHENIX was brought into collisions with 0 mrad first. Then STAR was brought into collisions after the beam-beam parameter from sPHENIX reduced to below $10 \times 10^{-3}$. (c) sPHENIX operated with a positive (+1.5 mrad) crossing angle, and STAR operated with 0 mrad. Both experiments were brought into collisions at the start of the store. The collisions with a crossing angle of up to $\pm 2$ mrad, as in running modes (a) and (c), lead to large Piwinski angle in the new sPHENIX detector, which reduces luminosity if other parameters are unchanged. There are two ways to compensate the reduction in luminosity: squeeze $\beta^{*}$ if there is sufficient dynamic aperture, or increase the injected beam intensity. The first part of polarized proton operation during RHIC Run 2024 was dedicated to increasing the intensity. Different configurations were tested with crossing angle and lattice adjustments on RHIC. At the same time, new injector configurations were developed and tested in an effort to push for both higher intensity and better quality of the beam injected into RHIC. When the beam intensity is increased, space charge is a concern particularly in the lower energy stages of acceleration, such as during the injection and the early part of the Booster cycle, which could become a dominant effect in limiting the intensity of the beam that can be delivered to RHIC.

43 PARTICLE ACCELERATORS↗

Effectiveness of denoising diffusion probabilistic models for fast and high-fidelity whole-event simulation in high-energy heavy-ion experiments

Artificial intelligence (AI) generative models, such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders, and normalizing flows, have been widely used and studied as efficient alternatives for traditional scientific simulations. However, they have several drawbacks, including training instability and inability to cover the entire data distribution, especially for regions where data are rare. This is particularly challenging for whole-event, full-detector simulations in high-energy heavy-ion experiments, such as sPHENIX at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and Large Hadron Collider experiments, where thousands of particles are produced per event and interact with the detector. This work investigates the effectiveness of denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs) as an AI-based generative surrogate model for the sPHENIX experiment that includes the heavy-ion event generation and response of the entire calorimeter stack. DDPM performance in sPHENIX simulation data is compared with a popular rival, GANs. Results show that both DDPMs and GANs can reproduce the data distribution where the examples are abundant (low-to-medium calorimeter energies). Nonetheless, DDPMs significantly outperform GANs, especially in high-energy regions where data are rare. Additionally, DDPMs exhibit superior stability compared to GANs. The results are consistent between both central and peripheral centrality heavy-ion collision events. Moreover, DDPMs offer a substantial speedup of approximately a factor of 100 compared to the traditional Geant4 simulation method.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Intelligent Experiments through Real-Time AI: Fast Data Processing and Autonomous Detector Control for High-Energy Nuclear Experiments

The aim of this project is to develop software and hardware for fast real-time data processing and autonomous detector control and calibration for the sPHENIX and the future EIC experiments. Below summarizes Georgia Tech team efforts in the past year: 1. We developed a real-time clustering algorithm and FPGA-based pipeline architecture for processing fired pixel data from ALPIDE sensors in sPHENIX experiments. Our Columnar Clustering Co-Design introduces a hardware-aware, stream-friendly approach that segments pixel data by column pairs using a Column Pair Clustering (CPC) strategy, followed by Cluster Stitching to merge adjacent subclusters. Implemented in Vitis HLS, the pipeline comprises five stages—read-in, subclustering, stitching, analysis, and write-out—connected by tagged HLS streams with custom end-of-event signaling for robust synchronization. We designed a pipelined dataflow model optimized for throughput, low latency, and minimal buffering, enabling scalable clustering across events of arbitrary size. Our system maintains spatial precision via center-of-mass and shape key extraction and efficiently handles edge cases such as fragmented or nested clusters. Compared against DBSCAN in both software and hardware, our approach demonstrates competitive performance under FPGA constraints. 2. We also conducted a comprehensive algorithm-to-hardware co-design of connected component analysis tailored for sPHENIX experiments, focusing on real-time, low-latency processing using FPGAs and High-Level Synthesis (HLS). Starting from a Python-based particle tracking pipeline, the team translated the core logic—graph traversal via DFS and Union-Find—into an HLS-compatible C++ model, replacing dynamic memory and recursion with static arrays and pipelined control flow. The final design includes a fully streamed and dataflow-compatible Union-Find kernel optimized across five iterations, incorporating loop pipelining, array partitioning, AXI/FIFO interface tuning, and function flattening. Experimental results show up to 14.8× speedup over the CPU baseline, reducing per-graph latency to 1.58 μs and demonstrating strong resource efficiency with only ~7k LUTs and zero BRAM usage. The design maintains functional correctness against the Python reference using a Python-based C-simulation framework and Mean Squared Error metrics. This work validates the potential of HLS-driven FPGA designs for edge-level HEP data acquisition, laying a scalable foundation for future integration with real-time detector pipelines and multi-graph processing systems.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗