The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) situated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States has completed its final series of collisions: opposing beams of oxygen nuclei were accelerated to nearly the speed of light and smashed together, with the STAR and sPHENIX detectors recording which particles emerged and in what quantities following the impact. This action marks the conclusion of operations for the facility, which has been dedicated to studying quark-gluon plasma and the internal structure of the proton since the year 2000. The laboratory officially announced the termination of the program.
Over the span of 25 years, the RHIC collider facilitated the collision of various nuclei across a range of energies. The goal was to reconstruct the characteristics of extremely hot and dense nuclear matter based on the resulting collision byproducts. In this concluding operational phase, sPHENIX captured collision data from polarized protons in a continuous stream mode for the first time at RHIC—a development physicists believe offers an opportunity to avoid missing rare or unexpected signatures. Researchers emphasize that the extensive datasets gathered still require thorough analysis, and plans are underway to repurpose the complex’s infrastructure for the construction of a new electron-ion collider.
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