RHIC Summer Sunday
Sunday, August 17, 2008 was a beautiful summer day and another very successful BNL Summer Sunday devoted to RHIC. Organized by Marsha Belford, many visitors toured the RHIC tunnel and the STAR and PHENIX experiments, led by physicists and engineers from the accelerator and experiments.
The history of Summer Sundays was explained in last year's RHIC News, and here are some pictures from this year's very successful event.
Visitors to the PHENIX experiment were able to step up onto the "sill" and see the detector open for maintenance and upgrades.
Achim Franz is shown here explaining some of the detectors in the PHENIX experiment. Small cloud chambers in which particle tracks could be seen were a popular exhibit.
Todd Satogata from the Collider-Accelerator Department explained RHIC operation before visitors entered the RHIC tunnel at building 1005.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory is a world-class scientific research facility primarily
funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. Hundreds
of physicists from around the world use RHIC to study what the
universe may have looked like in the first few moments after its
creation. What physicists learn from these collisions may help us
understand more about why the physical world works the way it does,
from the smallest subatomic particles, to the largest stars.