{"id":230930,"date":"2026-02-09T14:19:22","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T20:19:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/a-smashing-success-relativistic-heavy-ion-collider-wraps-up-final-collisions"},"modified":"2026-02-09T14:19:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T20:19:22","slug":"a-smashing-success-relativistic-heavy-ion-collider-wraps-up-final-collisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/a-smashing-success-relativistic-heavy-ion-collider-wraps-up-final-collisions","title":{"rendered":"A smashing success: Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider wraps up final collisions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/vYlFUBmqdes?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions\u2014oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons\u2014circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light inside the collider\u2019s two house-sized particle detectors, STAR and sPHENIX. RHIC, a nuclear physics research facility at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has been <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bnl.gov\/newsroom\/news.php?a=111052\" target=\"_blank\">smashing atoms<\/a> since the summer of 2000. The final collisions cap a quarter century of remarkable experiments using 10 different atomic species colliding over a wide range of energies in different configurations.<\/p>\n<p>The RHIC program has produced groundbreaking discoveries about the building blocks of matter and the nature of proton spin and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing that have far surpassed scientists\u2019 expectations when this discovery machine first turned on.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cRHIC has been one of the most successful user facilities operated by the DOE Office of Science, serving thousands of scientists from across the nation and around the globe,\u201d said DOE Under Secretary for Science Dar\u00edo Gil. \u201cSupporting these one-of-a-kind research facilities pushes the limits of technology and expands our understanding of our world through transformational science\u2014central pillars of DOE\u2019s mission to ensure America\u2019s security and prosperity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just after 9 a.m. on Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, final beams of oxygen ions\u2014oxygen atoms stripped of their electrons\u2014circulated through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference rings of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and crashed into one another at nearly the speed of light inside the collider\u2019s two house-sized particle detectors, STAR and sPHENIX. RHIC, a nuclear [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48,1492],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-230930","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230930","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\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=230930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/230930\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=230930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=230930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=230930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}