At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Long Island, NY, the main goal of research into heavy-ion collisions has been to understand Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD) in conditions of extreme temperature and energy density. At ordinary temperatures, the quarks and gluons are confined within particles like protons and neutrons, but at very high temperatures and densities, a new deconfined phase of quarks and gluons is created. This new phase is known as Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP).Quarks with the quantum numbers "charm" and "bottom" are relatively massive and are produced only rarely, and this category is called heavy flavor. Heavy-flavor measurements deepen our understanding of the properties and nature of the excited QGP state. Heavy-flavor particles are unique probes for studies of the hot and dense QGP medium created in high-energy collisions, as they are produced early in the evolution of the collision.STAR (Solenoidal Tracker At RHIC) is now the last operational detector at the RHIC facility, and was constructed and is operated by a large international collaboration. The STAR collaboration is composed of 68 institutions from 14 countries, with a total of 743 collaborators. In 2014, STAR employed a new silicon pixel technology detector named the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT). The HFT has separate layers of silicon to guide tracks reconstructed in the main tracking detector of STAR (the Time Projection Chamber) down to a spatial resolution of around 30 [mu]m in the region near the center of STAR where the collisions occur, which allows particles with very short lifetimes (notably heavy flavor particles) to be identified.In this dissertation, I use the HFT to measure particles with the charm quantum number. This work also involves using a pair of calorimeter detectors at a polar angle of zero degrees to estimate the azimuthal angle of the reaction plane in each collision. About 2.2 billion collisions are in the dataset being studied. These measurements allow the azimuthal anisotropy (flow) of charmed particles to be studied. The results are compared to similar studies involving light quarks and the predictions of several theoretical models. My results show a surprisingly large first Fourier harmonic in the anisotropy for particles with charm compared with particles with lighter flavors (strange, up, down). Specifically, the signal for charm is about 30 times larger, and no model comes anywhere close to predicting this pattern.

Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong interaction between quarks and gluons, predicts that at extreme conditions of high temperature and/or density, quarks and gluons are no longer confined within individual hadrons. This new deconfined state of quarks and gluons is called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The Universe was in this QGP state a few microseconds after the Big Bang. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) on Long Island, NY was built to create and study the properties of QGP.Due to their heavy masses, quarks with heavy flavor (charm and bottom) are mainly created during the early, energetic stages of the collisions. Heavy flavor is considered to be a unique probe for QGP studies, since it propagates through all phases of a collision, and is affected by the hot and dense medium throughout its evolution. Initial studies, via indirect reconstruction of heavy flavor using their decay electrons, indicated a much higher energy loss by these quarks compared to model predictions, with a magnitude comparable to that of light quarks. Mesons such as D0 could provide information about the interaction of heavy quarks with the surrounding medium through measurements such as elliptic flow. Such data help constrain the transport parameters of the QGP medium and reveal its degree of thermalization.Because heavy hadrons have a low production yield and short lifetime (e.g. ct = 120μm for D0), it is very challenging to obtain accurate measurements of open heavy flavor in heavy-ion collisions, especially since the collisions also produce large quantities of light-flavor particles. Also due to their short lifetime, it is difficult to distinguish heavy-flavor decay vertices from the primary collision vertex; one needs a very high precision vertex detector in order to separate and reconstruct the decay of the heavy flavor particles in the presence of thousands of other particles produced in each collision.The STAR collaboration built a new micro-vertex detector and installed it in the experiment in 2014. This state-of-the-art silicon pixel technology is named the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT). The HFT was designed in order to perform direct topological reconstruction of the weak decay products from hadrons that include a heavy quark. The HFT consists of four layers of silicon, and it improves the track pointing resolution of the STAR experiment from a few mm to around 30 ℗æm for charged pions at a momentum of 1 GeV/c.In this dissertation, I focus on one of the main goals of the HFT detector, which is to study the elliptic flow v2 (a type of azimuthal anisotropy) for D0 mesons in Au+Au collisions at vsNN = 200 GeV. My analysis is based on the 2014 data set (about 1.2 billion collisions covering all impact parameters) that include data from the HFT detector. There are two new and unique analysis elements used in this dissertation. First, I performed the analysis using a Kalman filter algorithm to reconstruct the charmed-meson candidates. The standard reconstruction is via a simple helix-swim method. The advantage of using the Kalman algorithm is in the use of the full error matrix of each track in the vertex estimation and reconstruction of the properties of the heavy-flavor parent particle. Second, I also used the Tool for Multivariate Analysis (TMVA), a ROOT-environment tool, to its full potential for signal significance optimization, instead of the previous approach based on a set of fixed cuts for separating signal from background.This dissertation presents the elliptic component (v2) of azimuthal anisotropy of D0 mesons as a function of transverse momentum, pT . The centrality (impact parameter) dependence of D0 v2(pT) is also studied. Results are compared with similar studies involving light quarks, and with the predictions of several theoretical models.

Strong enhancement of production of strange particles, and in particular of [phi] mesons, in heavy ion collisions of sufficiently high energies has been predicted to be an indication of a formation of a new state of matter, composed of deconfined quarks and gluons and having a property of chiral symmetry, called Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP). Studying production of [phi] mesons is of special interest due to their small cross-section of interaction with non-strange hadrons and due to their long lifetime, which should allow [phi] mesons to decouple from the strongly interacting medium produced in heavy ion collisions early in time and to escape the medium before decaying, thereby preserving information about the conditions in which the mesons were produced. In addition, the decay properties of [phi] mesons have been predicted to be modified in a hadronic gas medium. The [phi] -> K+K~ decay is of particular interest since the mass of a [phi] meson in vacuum is very close to the mass of two charged kaons, and consequently, even a small change in the mass or the width of [phi] mesons or in the mass of kaons would have a strong effect on the decay properties. Measurement of [phi] meson production using the PHOBOS detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has proven to be especially challenging due to a small acceptance of the PHOBOS spectrometer and due to a much lower than predicted yield of [phi] mesons in heavy ion collisions at the highest RHIC energy. The measurement required a development of a new tracking algorithm, specifically tailored to reconstruct charged kaons with a high efficiency in a high hit density environment, keeping at the same time the necessary computing time within feasible limits. Results of a measurement of [phi] meson invariant yield in the rapidity interval 0 y

This is a review volume containing articles written by experts on current theoretical topics in the subject of Quark-Gluon Plasma created in heavy-ion collisions at high energy. It is the fourth volume in the series with the same title sequenced numerically. The articles are written in a pedagogical style so that they can be helpful to a wide range of researchers from graduate students to mature physicists who have not worked previously on the subject. A reader should be able to learn from the reviews without having extensive knowledge of the background literature.

The azimuthal anisotropy of particle production is commonly used in high-energy nuclear collisions to study the early evolution of the expanding system. The prolate shape of uranium nuclei makes it possible to study how the geometry of the colliding nuclei affects final state anisotropies. It also provides a unique opportunity to understand how entropy is produced in heavy ion collisions. In this paper, the two- and four- particle cumulant v2 (v2{2} and v2{4}) from U+U collisions at √sNN = 193 GeV and Au+Au collisions at √sNN = 200 GeV for inclusive charged hadrons will be presented. The STAR Zero Degree Calorimeters are used to select very central collisions. Differences were observed between the multiplicity dependence of v2{2} for most central Au+Au and U+U collisions. The multiplicity dependence of v2{2} in central collisions were compared to Monte Carlo Glauber model predictions and it was seen that this model cannot explain the present results. (auth).