{"id":296328,"date":"2026-02-13T17:03:14","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T17:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296328\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T17:03:14","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T17:03:14","slug":"americas-largest-particle-collider-just-shut-down-heres-what-happens-next","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/296328\/","title":{"rendered":"America\u2019s Largest Particle Collider Just Shut Down. Here\u2019s What Happens Next"},"content":{"rendered":"

As foretold<\/a>, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider\u2014among the most powerful heavy-ion colliders in the world, second only to CERN\u2019s LHC\u2014ran its final particles and ceased operations last Friday.<\/p>\n

This is actually good news. Don\u2019t worry, the shutdown doesn\u2019t have much to do with the recent, general turmoil science has endured<\/a> in the U.S. The RHIC is actually going on a \u201cbreak\u201d while the Brookhaven National Laboratory, its operator, prepares to make room for its successor, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This is exciting, as Brookhaven\u2019s communication on the EIC\u2019s progress had been rather vague in the past couple of years.<\/p>\n

But news<\/a> of the RHIC\u2019s final run was accompanied by a slew of important announcements that the EIC is definitely coming and continues<\/a> to have decent government support, meaning that particle physics in the U.S. is not dead. If all goes well, by the mid-2030s, physicists will be better equipped to push the limit of physics.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019ll be good to sleep well for a while,\u201d Travis Shrey, a scientist at Brookhaven who coordinated RHIC\u2019s final run, told Scientific American<\/a>. \u201cI\u2019m excited to reach the finish line.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u201cBig Bang machines\u201d say goodnight \"RhicAn aerial view of the RHIC. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory <\/p>\n

Located in Upton, New York, the RHIC began operations in the year 2000. Its primary goal was to probe the internal structure of atoms, or more specifically, the strong force holding quarks together.<\/p>\n

That said, it\u2019s worth noting that the U.S. actually has many more active particle accelerators\u2014Fermilab in Illinois has several<\/a>, for instance. In fact, so does Brookhaven, and a good number<\/a> at that.<\/p>\n

What makes the RHIC different, however, is that the collider packs enough power to ram relatively heavier particles, like gold ions, into each other. In contrast, most particle accelerators point the particle beams at specific targets or zap particles with X-rays. In short, colliders are a specific subset of accelerators that are both tricky to build and manage.<\/p>\n

Before the RHIC shut down, it was the only operational particle collider in the U.S. and one of two heavy-ion colliders in the world, the other being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. Incidentally, the LHC will also go on break<\/a> this summer for the same reason: to prepare for its own successor, the High-Luminosity LHC.<\/p>\n

Looking to the future of physics <\/p>\n

During its run, data from the RHIC allowed physicists to arrive at several groundbreaking discoveries. For instance, it was the first facility to reproduce<\/a> quark-gluon plasma, an amalgam of quarks and gluons hypothesized to have filled the early universe. More recently\u2014just two days before the shutdown\u2014it characterized<\/a> how certain particle spins transform into visible matter from a quantum vacuum.<\/p>\n

\"BrookhavenAn infographic summarizing key statistics from the RHIC\u2019s history. Credit: Jen Abramowitz\/Brookhaven National Laboratory <\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, RHIC\u2019s final run actually was its longest, meaning the machine collected more data than it ever had. Analyzing all that will keep physicists occupied for at least another decade, so RHIC\u2019s science will \u201ccontinue until we analyze all the data and publish all the papers,\u201d Abhay Deshpande, Brookhaven\u2019s associate director for nuclear and particle physics, said in a statement<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The EIC will be literally, in part, built from the remnants of the RHIC, including its ion sources and superconducting magnets. The finished collider will be furnished with giant accelerator rings with a circumference of 2.4 miles (3.8 kilometers) and a house-sized detector to capture and produce 3D images of electrons, protons, and ions traveling nearly at the speed of light.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll learn how quarks and gluons generate mass, how their interactions contribute to proton spin, and much more that will revolutionize our understanding of matter\u2014much as the science we\u2019ve explored at RHIC has,\u201d Deshpande said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As foretold, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider\u2014among the most powerful heavy-ion colliders in the world, second only to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[136796,61,60,6410,248,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-296328","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-brookhaven-national-laboratory","9":"tag-ie","10":"tag-ireland","11":"tag-particle-physics","12":"tag-physics","13":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}