Brookhaven's rings of gold

19 July 2000

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The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York accelerates gold nuclei to nearly the speed of light. Two rings of magnets guide two beams of gold travelling in opposite directions, and once at full energy the beams collide head-on. This image shows the superconducting magnets in one of the rings. Each of the rings is 2.4 miles in circumference, and there are 1,740 of these magnets to guide and focus the particle beams. The goal at RHIC is to create quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that should have existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

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