Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
heavy-ion collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC ) is the first and one of only two operating heavy-ion colliders, and the only spin-polarized proton collider ever built. Located at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in Upton, New York, and used by an international team of researchers, it was the last operating particle collider in the US. By using RHIC to collide ions traveling at relativistic speeds, physicists study the primordial form of matter that existed in the universe shortly after the Big Bang. By colliding spin-polarized protons, the spin structure of the proton is explored.
RHIC was the second-highest-energy heavy-ion collider in the world, with nucleon energies for collisions reaching 100 GeV for gold ions and 250 GeV for protons. As of November 7, 2010, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has collided heavy ions of lead at higher energies than RHIC. The LHC operating time for ions (lead–lead and lead–proton collisions) is limited to about one month per year.
In 2010, RHIC physicists published results of temperature measurements from earlier experiments which concluded that temperatures in excess of 345 MeV (4 terakelvin or 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit) had been achieved in gold ion collisions, and that these collision temperatures resulted in the breakdown of "normal matter" and the creation of a liquid-like quark–gluon plasma.
In January 2020, the US Department of Energy Office of Science selected the eRHIC design for the future Electron–Ion collider (EIC), building on the existing RHIC facility at BNL.
RHIC had its last collisions and ended data collection on 6 February 2026.
The accelerator
RHIC is an intersecting storage ring particle accelerator. Two independent rings (arbitrarily denoted as "Blue" and "Yellow") circulate heavy ions and/or polarized protons in opposite directions and allow a virtually free choice of colliding positively charged particles (the eRHIC upgrade will allow collisions between positively and negatively charged particles). The RHIC double storage ring is hexagonally shaped and has a circumference of 3834 m, with curved edges in which stored particles are deflected and focused by 1,740 superconducting magnets using niobium-titanium conductors.
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