Brookhaven’s RHIC Sets Record

July 23, 2012

Brookhaven recently learned that Guinness World Records has recognized our 2.4-mile particle accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), for generating a record temperature of 7.2 trillion degrees — about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. 

The temperature, achieved for fractions of a second on a microscopic scale, occurs when gold nuclei collide after circulating around the RHIC ring at near light-speed. The energy released is so intense it melts the neutrons and protons inside the gold nuclei into quarks and gluons, forming a nearly friction-free particle soup called quark-gluon plasma. RHIC physicists measured the temperature of the ultra-hot matter, which is thought to have filled the universe just after the Big Bang, back in 2010. Guinness took notice and sent the “hot” news circulating around the world again this summer.

RHIC may not hold onto its record for generating the highest man-made temperature for long, however. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Europe smashes lead ions together at even higher energy. But scientists there haven’t published a temperature measurement – yet.

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