One of the DOE's historic machines will retire this year
Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have entered the final year of experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) – a world-class particle accelerator and one of the only two operating heavy-ion colliders ever built.
The team has used RHIC to smash the nuclei of gold atoms at near-light speed since 2000, collecting data to recreate and study quark-gluon plasma (QGP or quark soup). This hot, dense state of matter consisting of the innermost building blocks of protons and neutrons, is believed to have filled the universe nearly 14 billion years ago, just microseconds after the Big Bang. Set free through RHIC’s collisions, the matter – quarks, antiquarks, and gluons – come together to recreate the primordial plasma for detailed study.
In RHIC’s 25th and final run, scientists will use the accelerator, detector, and data-capturing capabilities developed over the past two decades to explore the quark-gluon plasma with unprecedented precision.
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