{"id":209987,"date":"2025-03-28T22:02:23","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T03:02:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/legendary-u-s-particle-collider-is-about-to-perform-its-final-smash"},"modified":"2025-03-28T22:02:23","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T03:02:23","slug":"legendary-u-s-particle-collider-is-about-to-perform-its-final-smash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/legendary-u-s-particle-collider-is-about-to-perform-its-final-smash","title":{"rendered":"Legendary U.S. Particle Collider Is About to Perform Its Final Smash"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/legendary-u-s-particle-collider-is-about-to-perform-its-final-smash.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory\u2019s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots\u2014erm, superconducting magnets.<\/p>\n<p>The collider\u2019s final run\u2014its 25th\u2014kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded\u2014in fact, transformed into\u2014Brookhaven Lab\u2019s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). Over the course of 2025, RHIC physicists will complete data collection on quark-gluon plasma, the soup of particles that existed in the earliest days of the universe.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe original idea behind RHIC was to create, for the first time on Earth, a state of matter that existed in the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang: the quark-gluon plasma, and we did,\u201d said James Dunlop, the associate department chair for nuclear physics at Brookhaven Lab, in a call with Gizmodo. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the big legacies\u2014that we actually created it\u2014but the more interesting thing is that its properties were quite different from what we\u2019d expected them to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>After 25 years of smashing gold nuclei together at light speeds, Brookhaven National Laboratory\u2019s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is hanging up its boots\u2014erm, superconducting magnets. The collider\u2019s final run\u2014its 25th\u2014kicked off this week on Long Island, in a swan song for the venerable collider that will be succeeded\u2014in fact, transformed into\u2014Brookhaven Lab\u2019s Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":661,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-209987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/661"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=209987"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/209987\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=209987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=209987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=209987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}