This weekend I’ll be headed up to Long Island, where I’ll be one of the volunteers for the Brookhaven National Laboratory Summer Sundays public tours of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. It’s free and no reservations are required. Details are available here. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in particle accelerators.
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a little over a kilometer in diameter. By comparison, the LHC is about 8.5 kilometers in diameter. The top center of mass energy at RHIC is 500 GeV for proton-proton collisions and 200 GeV for heavy ion collisions, about 1/28th of the top LHC energies. While the LHC can collide protons at the top energy in the world, RHIC is the only machine that can collide polarized protons. Currently RHIC can collide heavy ions at the highest energy in the world – until this fall, when we expect our first heavy ion collisions at the LHC. RHIC can produce collisions at center of mass energies as low as 7 GeV. Additionally, RHIC can collide deuterons with gold. With RHIC and the LHC combined, we can study different regions of the phase diagram of nuclear matter.
There are two main experiments still taking data at RHIC, STAR and PHENIX. (I was on STAR as a PhD student; I am now a member of PHENIX.) During the tours, you’ll be able to see part of the collider tunnel and both the STAR and PHENIX experiments. You’ll be guided by physicists working on the collider and on STAR and PHENIX. (I will be giving tours of the PHENIX experiment.)
If you’ve never seen an accelerator or a particle physics experiment and you’re in the area, I’d strongly recommend you make the trip out to Long Island. Hope to see you on Sunday!
I live in PA but have family in Suffolk County, Long Island (Port Jefferson – not far from Brookhaven Lab). I am very interested in the Large Hadron Supercollider and the search for the Higgs Boson. Didn’t know a particle collider existed so close to somewhere I’ve been going to all my life. Are the Sunday tours only in the summer? Are they only on Sundays? If so, when’s the last weekend? I do have a Christening coming up in about two weeks and will be on the Island…
Hi Bob – unfortunately this was the last weekend this summer. If you follow the first link above you’ll see the schedule. Each Summer Sunday there are tours of different facilities. The RHIC tour is usually in early August. I’m not sure when the schedule for 2011 will be posted but it’s usually posted by late spring. It is in possible to do a group tour at other times of the year (see here: http://www.bnl.gov/community/tours.asp) – they request a minimum of 10 people. If you’re specifically interested in RHIC, the Summer Sundays are the best time to go because you can see the most. RHIC runs 3-6 months per year and while it’s running, you can’t really see much because we can’t let people in everywhere. When it’s not running we do maintenance and improvements. On Summer Sundays things are set up so people can see as much as possible and there are public lectures. We even direct grad students who haven’t seen the experiments yet to look then. So it would be possible to go at a different time (if you can get a large enough group), but if it’s possible to make it out for a RHIC Summer Sunday, you’d probably get the most out of it.