![\"Mark](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/1770484748_709_image.jpeg\"\/)
<\/p>\nOfficials at Brookhaven National Laboratory pushed the button on the final smash up in its $2 billion Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider in Upton Friday, marking a quarter century of ground-breaking research while ushering in the start of its more advanced, $2.9 billion replacement.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has transformed our understanding of matter,\u201d said Dario Gil, undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, during a daylong visit to the lab.\u00a0He called the work \u201can extraordinary success,” after pushing the button for\u00a0the last collision by the collider.<\/p>\n
Later, he announced\u00a0a federal decision for the 2020-approved\u00a0new Electron Ion Collider that\u00a0includes\u00a0an early funding round of\u00a0$67\u00a0million for “long-lead” materials that will allow\u00a0a critical early phase of work to move forward. \u201cYou made RHIC [the heavy-ion collider] a success and you are the reason [the Department of Energy]\u00a0is confident of the future\u201d of the next-level collider, Gil said.<\/p>\n
The heavy-ion collider for the past 25 years conducted\u00a0300 trillion collisions of atoms of elements such as gold and uranium, stripping them of their electrons and accelerating to\u00a0nearly the speed of light in a\u00a02.4 mile underground tunnel. The immediate aftermath of those collisions provides a snapshots into what scientists believe are\u00a0the origins of all matter in the universe.<\/p>\n
The work has generated mountains of data that will continue to power research for coming years, even as work on the\u00a0Electron-Ion Collider progresses toward its first experiments by the mid-2030s, officials said.<\/p>\n
New York State has\u00a0committed $100 million to the facility for the new collider, said state Economic Development Corp. Chairman Kevin Law, money that will be used to fund new infrastructure for the electron collider, including 14 new buildings. Much of the equipment from the heavy-ion collider will still be repurposed for the new collider, including the tunnel and one of the collider rings, and staff are\u00a0transitioning to the new work.<\/p>\n
Funding from Congress included years\u00a0of work by Democratic U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, who called the facility a \u201csmashing success,\u201d and by Republican U.S. Rep. Nick LaLota, both of whom appeared via video.<\/p>\n
The work gave scientists from 36 countries important new clues into how nearly massless quarks and gluons \u2014 the building blocks of matter \u2014 generate all visible matter, advancing and building on past work as groundbreaking as that of Albert Einstein.<\/p>\n
\u201cI believe he\u2019d be amazed by it,\u201d said John Hill, interim director of BNL, during a tour of the facility Friday. \u201cSome of [Einstein\u2019s] principles are embodied in these machines. We\u2019re actually studying what it looked like right after the Big Bang. Einstein would be amazed by it all.\u201d<\/p>\n
Work on the electron collider\u00a0will involve \u201cthousands of businesses and engineers and technicians,\u201d Gil said, collaborating to build the new machine.\u201d Artificial intelligence will play an\u00a0end-to-end role in the new collider, he said.<\/p>\n
The new collider will provide deeper insights into the origin of matter, said Abhay Deshpande, associate BNL director. He compared\u00a0the difference to smashing two watermelons together under the heavy-ion collider and\u00a0slicing a watermelon with a knife with the new one.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can cut it in a controlled way with precision to understand [the material]\u00a0much much better,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u00a0Potential applications from the work so far include building more focused beams for the treatment of cancer, as well as national security applications for radiation studies on material entering the U.S. via shipping ports.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n\tMark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Officials at Brookhaven National Laboratory pushed the button on the final smash up in its $2 billion Relativistic…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":454832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":{"0":"post-454831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=454831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/454831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/454832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=454831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=454831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=454831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}