This animation follows polarized protons as they travel through the RHIC accelerator complex to the experiments. The arrows indicate the direction of each proton's spin. The animation concludes with a fly-by of the RHIC experiments running during the spin program.
RHIC research has captured worldwide attention with an astonishing surprise: instead of behaving like a gas, the matter created in RHIC’s energetic gold-gold collisions appears to be more like a "perfect" liquid with virtually no resistance to flow. More...
Physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider were exploring the puzzle of proton spin as they began taking data during the 2009 RHIC run. For the first time, RHIC ran at a record energy of 500 giga-electron volts (GeV) per collision, more than double the previous runs in which polarized proton beams collided at 200 GeV. Narrarated by RHIC run coordinator Mei Bai.
Physicist Peter Steinberg explains that fundamental particles like protons are themselves made up of still smaller particles called quarks. He discusses how new particles are produced when quarks are liberated from protons...a process that can be observed at RHIC.
Physicist Peter Steinberg explains what happens when atomic nucleii travelling at close to the speed of light smash together at RHIC.
Physicist Peter Steinberg explains the nature of the quark gluon plasma (QGP), a new state of matter produced at RHIC.
Operated by Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Nuclear Physics.
Report problems with this page
XHTML 1.0, CSS
