Brookhaven Lab Shuts Down Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)

Source: Slashdot

History of RHIC

Early achievements

• 2001 – Brookhaven Lab produced, for the first time, collisions of gold nuclei at a center‑of‑mass energy of 200 GeV per nucleon.
• 2002 – Researchers suggested the possible creation of a new type of matter in these collisions.

Notable discoveries

• 2010 – A record‑breaking 4 trillion‑degree plasma was generated, earning a Guinness World Record for the hottest man‑made temperature.
• 2023 – Scientists announced the observation of an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement.

Final shutdown (2026)

On Friday, February 6, 2026, a control room filled with scientists, administrators, and members of the press gathered at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions (reported by Scientific American).

“The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Darío Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider’s quarter‑century saga…
‘I’m really sad,’ said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist. ‘It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we’re going to put something even better there.’”

The successor will be a far more powerful Electron‑Ion Collider (EIC), built in part from RHIC’s infrastructure—most notably one of its two giant subterranean storage rings. Construction is slated for the next decade.

“We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end,” says Wolfram Fischer, chair of BNL’s collider‑accelerator department. “It’s bittersweet.”

The EIC will replace one ion ring with a new electron ring, using high‑energy electrons as “tiny knives” to probe the structure of gold ions. Physicists anticipate unprecedented insight into quarks, gluons, and the strong force.

“For at least 10 or 15 years, this will be the number‑one place in the world for young physicists to come,” notes Abhay Deshpande, BNL’s associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics.

RHIC’s scientific legacy

• RHIC uniquely achieved collisions of two protons with precisely aligned spins, a capability unmatched by any other experiment to date.
• Over its 25‑year run, RHIC illuminated the strongest force in nature and its fundamental constituents, created the largest assemblies of antimatter ever observed, and helped resolve the long‑standing proton‑spin crisis.
• Early heavy‑ion collisions (starting in 2000) produced quark‑gluon plasma (QGP). By 2010, scientists confirmed that the plasma behaved not as a gas but as a near‑perfect, low‑viscosity liquid with record‑high vorticity.
• Data from the final run revealed the first direct evidence of “virtual particles” within the QGP, offering a novel probe of the quantum vacuum.
• The last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, ensuring that RHIC’s scientific output will continue to be mined long after the collisions cease.

“It was paradigm‑changing,” says Paul Mantica, division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE Office of Nuclear Physics.

Broader impact

Science News highlighted that RHIC’s closure marks the end of the only particle collider operating in the United States and the only one of its kind worldwide. Most accelerators cannot steer two particle beams to collide head‑on, underscoring RHIC’s unique role in U.S. high‑energy physics.

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