My postdoctoral research was conducted at the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) on experiment R807.
As I describe here, I was incredibly excited by this opportunity. R807 was arguably the first modern hadron collider experiment, and it was led by the visionary Bill Willis and the incredibly talented Chris Fabjan. As I described at a symposium in Bill’s memory, when I was a graduate student I was inspired by his article in the January, 1982 issue of the CERN Courier. Working in this collaboration with Bill, Sherman Frankel and so many other excellent physicists was enormously stimulating. The program at the ISR was in some sense a preview of what we would have in the PHENIX Collaboration – a mixture of particle physics and “heavy” ion physics (“heavy” in quotes because the most massive system we studied were α+α collisions). But we studied many phenomena of relevance to RHIC collisions: transverse energy production, HBT correlations, K/π ratios, direct photons, di-lepton pairs, etc. I could not have asked for a better postdoctoral experience.
