Physics at sPHENIX

The sPHENIX experiment at RHIC, which started the operation in 2023, is designed to investigate the detailed properties of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) through high-precision measurements of jets and heavy quarks. The physics program encompasses a broad range of topics, including parton energy loss, quarkonium suppression, jet structure modification, and the spin structure of the proton. An alternative approach to event engineering, based on two-dimensional event classification using charged-particle multiplicity and spectator energy, has been proposed at PHENIX and could be particularly effective in the context of sPHENIX due to its comprehensive detector coverage. Performance evaluations of detector subsystems—such as the Intermediate Silicon Tracker (INTT), Minimum-Bias Detector (MBD), Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal), Time Projection Chamber (TPC), and Time Projection Chamber Outer Tracker (TPOT)—demonstrate that the experiment is suitably equipped for upcoming high-statistics Au+Au collisions.