At the moment the central focus of the Czech participation at BNL is the access to the STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX experiments situated at the RHIC facility at BNL.
There are four main types of users of the BNL-CZ:
Group 1: Members of institutions in STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX collaboration
Group 2: Members of Czech teams in STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX collaboration
Group 3: Users of Sunrise cluster in CTU Prague
Group 4: Users of scientific results produced based on data published in BNL related research
Group 1
Research in BNL is typically done in large multinational collaborations. As today (October 2017) the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC is composed of scientists, students, and engineers from 27 U.S. institutions and laboratories and 44 non-U.S. institutions from 13 countries. The STAR collaboration is currently composed of 63 institutions out of which 33 are non-U.S. institutions from 12 countries worldwide. In total there are 582 authors in STAR and 431 authors in PHENIX collaboration. Since BNL is a laboratory funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science it is open to the U.S. as well as institutions from abroad based on a bilateral agreement between a given user institution and BNL. Typical agreements for institutions involved in the RHIC experiments are non-proprietary user agreements which sample can be found at BNL - agreements . The up-to-date list of all institutions collaborating with BNL either at RHIC or other BNL’s facilities based on the Non-Proprietary User agreements can be found at agreements.
The members of BNL-CZ provide services to all members of collaboration by maintaining and operation detectors during data taking, QA of the data and physics results, preparing software and helping with data analysis. If Czech institution would like to become an institutional member BNL-CZ provide assistance in this process. The details of the admission process are described in bylaws of the experiments.
Group 2
Members of STAR, PHENIX and sPHENIX group in CTU Prague, Charles University, and NPI Prague are also in the role of users. Potential new users are included to the teams by council representatives. Typically these are students and scientists performing research based on BNL data and colleagues doing R&D of detectors. Currently, there are 37 local STAR users and 38 local PHENIX users.
Group 3
BNL-CZ supports also users of Sunrise cluster at CTU Prague, especially for BNL related research of our users. As users, we count active access to the cluster. In 2017 there were 1800 individual logins to the cluster.
Group 4
The results of research in BNL are data. These data are published by scientific collaborations in form of spectra, yields, and other signals. These data are further used for research by external users resulting in new information and publications. We count how many times STAR or PHENIX data were used and our papers were quoted. So far STAR collaboration published 198 papers and they were quoted in total 25 002 times. This includes 11 renowned papers that were quoted more 500 times. In 2017 there were 11 papers published by STAR and were already cited 200 times.