Running Low On Cash, U.S. Physicists Recommend Shutting Off Nation's Last Big Collider
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider Ring Brookhaven National LaboratoryIt will be a disaster for the U.S. physics community, say scientists. A group of scientists is reluctantly recommending that the U.S. shut off its last giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in the face of declining federal funds. With the Tevatron at Fermilab dismantled, RHIC represented a last bastion of high-energy particle colliding in this country. It must be sacrificed so that other particle acceleration projects might live. Like its name implies, RHIC smashes heavy ions together at incredible speeds, which produces super-hot temperatures that melt the building blocks of atoms. As protons and neutrons break apart, their constituent parts, gluons and quarks, form a new state of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. This particle soup is so hot--250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun--that the unchained particles behave in very strange ways, which can...