Ready for gold collisions at RHIC
23 June 1999
The twin magnet rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York, lie in wait for the machine's first head-on collisions between beams of gold ions, expected towards the end of June 1999. The collisions of these heavy ions - each with 79 protons and 118 neutrons - at an energy of 100 GeV (gigaelectronvolts) per nucleon will recreate the extreme conditions of the early Universe, and allow the study a rare state of matter known as the quark-gluon plasma. The rings contain 1740 superconducting magnets in a circular tunnel about 3.8 km in circumference. The magnet rings appear as two pipes, each of which is in effect a huge vacuum flask which keeps the magnets bathed in liquid helium at a temperature of 4.5 degrees above absolute zero, or -268.5 C.
Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory
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