Gold strikes gold at the highest energies

18 July 2001

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The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York has resumed collisions of high-energy gold nuclei, in its attempt to create quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that should have existed only ten millionths of a second after the Big Bang. The machine is now operating at 100 GeV per nucleon, which gives a colossal total collision energy as each gold nucleus contain 179 nucleons (neutrons and protons in all). This image - which looks almost like a bird in flight! - shows the aftermath of one of the head-on collisions at the heart of the PHOBOS detector, one of four detectors at RHIC. The coloured dots show where thousands of particles produced in the collision struck silicon detectors in a cylindrical array around the collision point, and in and two "spectrometer arms". The red lines are the reconstructed tracks of some of those particles

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

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