RHIC Construction Starts
Inside an underground accelerator tunnel, scientists, engineers, and technicians began building two separate accelerator rings, each 2.4 miles in circumference and composed of some 1,740 superconducting magnets. Much of the work was done in collaboration with local industry, including the Northrop-Grumman Corporation, which manufactured many of the superconducting magnets at its Bethpage, New York, facility.
First Magnet in RHIC Tunnel: Collider Installation Begins
With the push of a button at 4:10 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 5, 1994, then-Laboratory Director Nicholas Samios lowered the first magnet onto its stand in the tunnel of RHIC — ceremonially beginning installation of the collider itself. Pictured above: Magnet Number One arrives at Brookhaven Lab.
STAR Detector Groundbreaking
Ceremoniously beginning construction of the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC, known as STAR, on March 17, 1995, are: (from left) then-RHIC Project Head Satoshi Ozaki; then-STAR Project Director Jay Marx, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; then-Brookhaven Lab Director Nicholas Samios; and then-RHIC Project Manager Jim Yeck. STAR was one of four detectors slated to capture particle collision data as RHIC started up.
Massive Physics Apparatus Arrives at Brookhaven Lab
A six-ton, $10-million piece of scientific equipment arrived at Brookhaven Lab on Nov. 6, 1997, ready to take its place in the atom smasher now under construction. Called a Time Projection Chamber, or TPC, the device measured 4.2 meters (nearly 14 feet) long and 4.1 meters (13.5 feet) wide. The TPC is the heart of a house-sized experiment called STAR — a detector that acts as a sort of 3D camera for subatomic particles. The STAR TPC was shipped to Brookhaven from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, where it was designed and built over four years by more than 90 people from nine institutions. More...
First Siberian Snake Magnet
Specialized sets of magnets called Siberian snakes were included in the RHIC accelerator rings help to maximize the success of RHIC's exploration of proton spin. The magnets' corkscrew-like design causes the direction of the magnetic field to spiral along the direction of the beam. This setup periodically flips the protons' polarization, or direction of spin, and simultaneously averages out many smaller effects that would otherwise depolarize the proton beams.
RHIC Dedication Ceremony
On Monday, Oct. 4, 1999, the RHIC was dedicated following successful commissioning. The event outside Brookhaven Lab's Collider Center was attended by many guests and Lab employees and included musical selections played by the Longwood High School marching band, an imaginative and athletic interpretation of “colliding ions” from the Longwood cheerleaders, and tours of the RHIC facility. More...
RHIC Computing Facility Ramps Up
As the time approached for the RHIC experiments to start “Day One” physics, the RHIC Computing Facility (RCF) ramped up towards its production levels. RCF was designed to archive, reconstruct, and analyze the immense amount of data to be produced by the RHIC complex.
East Arm of PHENIX Inches Into Place
After several days of only an inch-per-minute movement, the east arm of the massive PHENIX detector at RHIC was finally put into place on Jan. 21, 2000, completing the detector's assembly. More...
Magnets Cooled, Beams Circulating
The cooldown of RHIC's magnets and testing of power supplies was well underway as of March 2000. Then, the RHIC team worked around the clock to steer beams around the twin tracks of the accelerator and ramp them up for the machine’s first heavy ion collisions. On April 2, 2000, the RHIC team began injecting gold ions into the blue ring. Soon after, on May 7, 2000, beam was successfully circulated in the yellow ring.
RHIC Begins Smashing Atoms
On the evening of Monday, June 12, 2000, operators in the main control room of RHIC anxiously watched control displays as the beams circulating in the collider's twin rings appeared to be colliding. All four of RHIC's detectors — BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR — were poised and ready to take data as the accelerator physicists began to steer the beams into collision, necessarily one detector at a time. The first spectacular images of particles streaming from a head-on collision point were produced by STAR shortly before 9 p.m. More...
All Four RHIC Detectors Track Collisions
By the end of RHIC's first week of collisions, all four detectors — BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR — had produced stunning images. These four detectors were designed to complement one another in their study of subatomic matter and the quest for definitive evidence of the formation of the quark-gluon plasma. More...
First Results from Brookhaven Lab's New Collider
Nearly 700 physicists from around the world gathered at Quark Matter 2001 at Stony Brook University to hear breaking news about the exploration of a new frontier recently opened at RHIC. Among the first findings at the collider: Collisions between gold ions created nuclear matter resulting from the highest energy density ever achieved in a scientific experiment at the time. More...
Full-energy Collisions are Achieved at RHIC
Brookhaven Lab took its search for an elusive form of matter to a new level by bringing the RHIC up to full collision energy — collisions at 100 billion electron volts (GeV) per nucleon, or 200 GeV at the center of mass. More...
RHIC Begins Colliding High-energy Polarized Protons
RHIC began investigating another fundamental question that has puzzled physicists: Where do protons get their spin, a property of elementary particles as basic as mass and electrical charge? Pictured above: The individuals responsible for initiating the polarized proton program at RHIC: Gerry Bunce, Michael Tannenbaum, Thomas Roser, Yousef Makdisi, and Satoshi Ozaki. More...
Exciting First Results from Deuteron-Gold Collisions
Results strengthen scientists' confidence that RHIC collisions of gold ions created unusual conditions and that they are on the right path to discover a form of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, believed to have existed in the first microseconds after the birth of the universe. More...
RHIC Scientists Serve Up 'Perfect Liquid'
The four detector groups conducting research at RHIC said they created a new state of hot, dense matter out of the quarks and gluons that are the basic particles of atomic nuclei, but it is a state quite different and even more remarkable than had been predicted. More...
‘Perfect’ Liquid Hot Enough to be Quark Soup
Analyses from RHIC established that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius — the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. These temperature measurements, combined with other observations analyzed over nine years of operations by RHIC's four experimental collaborations — BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and STAR — indicated that RHIC's gold-gold collisions produce a freely flowing liquid composed of quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). More...
Exotic Antimatter Detected at RHIC
Scientists reported a discovery of, at the time, the heaviest known antinucleus and first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark, laying the first stake in a new frontier of physics. More...
New Beam Source for Brookhaven Accelerators
A new facility, the Electron Beam Ion Source (EBIS), became the starting point for the beams entering two major research facilities: RHIC and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory. EBIS produces and accelerates beams with greater versatility, enabling studies with new kinds of ions previously unavailable to researchers. More...
Tiny Drops of Hot Quark Soup: How Small Can They Be?
Collisions between gold nuclei and deuterons — much smaller particles made of just one proton and one neutron — weren’t supposed to create the superhot subatomic soup known as the QGP. They were designed as a control experiment, to generate data to compare against RHIC’s gold-gold smashups. But analyses indicated that these smaller particle impacts may be serving up miniscule drops of hot QGP. More...
Tracking the Transition of Early-universe Quark Soup to Matter-as-we-know-it
STAR data suggest that the type of transition changes depending on the energy that particles have when they collide. More...
Physicists Narrow Search for Solution to Proton Spin Puzzle
Findings show for the first time that gluons make a significant contribution to proton spin, and that transient “sea quarks” — which form primarily when gluons split — also play a role. More...
Giant Electromagnet Arrives at Brookhaven Lab to Map Melted Matter
A 20-ton superconducting magnet traveled from California's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory to New York's Brookhaven Lab as part of a proposed upgrade to the RHIC’s PHENIX detector. More...
'Perfect Liquid' Quark-Gluon Plasma is the Most Vortical Fluid
Particle collisions recreating the QGP that filled the early universe reveal that droplets of this primordial soup swirl far faster than any other fluid. The results add a new record to the list of remarkable properties ascribed to the quark-gluon plasma. More...
Sea Quark Surprise Reveals Deeper Complexity in Proton Spin Puzzle
Data from the STAR experiment add detail — and complexity — to an intriguing puzzle that scientists have been seeking to solve: how the building blocks that make up a proton contribute to its spin. More...
Department of Energy Selects Site for Electron-Ion Collider
The U.S. Department of Energy named Brookhaven National Laboratory as the site for building an Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), a one-of-a-kind nuclear physics research facility. The design for an EIC at Brookhaven included building components that would operate seamlessly with existing infrastructure currently providing beams for RHIC. More...
'Strange' Glimpse into Neutron Stars and Symmetry Violation
New results from precision particle detectors at RHIC offer a fresh glimpse of the particle interactions that take place in the cores of neutron stars and give nuclear physicists a new way to search for violations of fundamental symmetries in the universe. More...
Collisions of Light Produce Matter/Antimatter from Pure Energy
Scientists studying particle collisions at RHIC produced definitive evidence for two physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago. The primary finding was that pairs of electrons and positrons — particles of matter and antimatter — can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. The second result showed that the path of light traveling through a magnetic field in a vacuum bends differently depending on how that light is polarized. More...
Successful Deployment of Equipment to New Scientific Data & Computing Center
A team successfully transported computing and networking hardware for the Scientific Data and Computing Center (SDCC) — now Scientific Computing and Data Facilities (SCDF) — and deployed additional new pieces, including five new racks and an advanced cooling system. The mission-critical computers have played a crucial role in storing, distributing, and analyzing data for experiments at RHIC as well as the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland and the Belle II experiment at Japan’s SuperKEKB particle accelerator. More...
Clear Sign that QGP Production 'Turns Off' at Low Energy
Physicists report new evidence that production of an exotic state of matter in collisions of gold nuclei at RHIC can be “turned off” by lowering the collision energy. The “off” signal shows up as a sign change — from negative to positive — in data that describe “higher order” characteristics of the distribution of protons produced in these collisions. More...
Direct Photons Point to Positive Gluon Polarization
Results from 'golden measurement' at RHIC's PHENIX experiment show the spins of gluons align with the spin of the proton they're in. More...
sPHENIX Detector is Ready for Collisions
The state-of-the-art sPHENIX detector is fully assembled and gearing up to grab particle collision snapshots. The completion of assembly marks the detector's transition from a construction project to running experiment RHIC. More...
New Heaviest Exotic Antimatter Nucleus
Members of RHIC’s STAR Collaboration discovered a new kind of antimatter nucleus, the heaviest ever detected. Composed of four antimatter particles — an antiproton, two antineutrons, and one antihyperon — these exotic antinuclei are known as antihyperhydrogen-4. More...
Fresh, Direct Evidence for Tiny Drops of Quark-Gluon Plasma
Particles of light emitted from collisions of deuterons with gold ions provide direct evidence that energetic jets get “stuck” — a key signature of the quark-gluon plasma. More...
RHIC Enters 25th and Final Run
RHIC entered its 25th and final year of operations, smashing together the nuclei of gold atoms traveling close to the speed of light. In Run 25, scientists used all the accelerator, detector, and data-capturing capabilities physicists have developed at RHIC over its 25- year history to probe the QGP with unprecedented precision. More...
Rare Particle Pairs Point to Primordial Soup's Temperature at Different Stages
Analysis of data captured by the STAR detector at RHIC revealed the QGP's temperature at different stages of its evolution following collisions of gold ions — the nuclei of gold atoms stripped of their electrons. These measurements are key to mapping out how nuclear matter changes as quarks and gluons in the hot soup cool and coalesce to form more ordinary nuclear particles. More...
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Brookhaven Science Associates manages and operates Brookhaven National Laboratory on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science. BSA is a partnership between Battelle and The Research Foundation for the State University of New York on behalf of Stony Brook University. | More
