During the STAR Analysis Meeting at LBNL we got a great opportunity to look at one of the sectors of the Event Plane Detector (EPD) before it got boxed up and shipped to BNL. The EPD is a very important detector upgrade in anticipation of the Run 18 (2018) and the BES Phase-2 which is currently scheduled to take place 2019-2020. The detector allows for an independent determination of the collision geometry by measuring the so-called event plane. The event plane effectively spans between the beam direction and the impact parameter, i.e. the line between the centers of both incoming nuclei.

In the picture that I took one can see such an EPD tile and from left to right Zhangbu Xu (STAR spokesperson), Xu Sun, and Alex Schmah (project co-leader). If you look careful, you can see in the back a wooden box in which another EPD tile is already nicely bundled up and ready for shipment.

The tiles will be installed ahead of RHIC Run-17 in order to gain further insights when operating this subdetector in a typical collisions environment.