[HN Gopher] Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with fin...
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Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions
Author : gnufx
Score : 94 points
Date : 2026-02-07 19:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hpcwire.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hpcwire.com)
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| This is in preparation for starting construction work on the
| Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and
| experiment locations.
| gnufx wrote:
| As I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I
| remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s,
| with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy
| long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure
| research there as a result.
| phongn wrote:
| ISABELLE, which was a cancelled proton-proton collider. Major
| delays with its magnet design meant that it was overtaken by
| existing programs at CERN and Fermilab. RHIC reused its hall.
| webdevver wrote:
| as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a
| very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any
| discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way
| into an industrial product?)
|
| maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps
| the first step was to create a much smarter entity than
| ourselves, and then letting _it_ have a look at the collider
| data.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Look at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that
| require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your
| application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any
| effect they discover.
|
| The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far
| beyond the scales where we operate.
| tehnub wrote:
| I don't think that argument holds up. See quantum mechanics.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Quantum mechanics is demonstrable on a lab bench (or
| smaller), so your counterargument is completely wrong.
|
| _Any_ useful consequence of a physical effect is, in
| effect, an experiment that could test that effect. So if
| the smallest test is with a machine the size of a small
| country, no device using the effect can be smaller.
| tehnub wrote:
| They're using big things to do experiments. Maybe they
| discover some new physical effect. How do you know that
| that effect couldn't be demonstrated in some smaller
| scale experiment after it's understood better?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Can you tell me of an example where that has happened? I
| can't think of any.
| T-A wrote:
| Effective field theory
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_field_theory
|
| demonstrably works up to the electroweak scale, which
| requires an LHC-sized machine to probe.
| lefra wrote:
| The first working transistor was centimeter-scale, now
| billions of them fit in that space.
|
| The first useful internal combustion engines were room-
| sized, now they fit on a moped.
|
| The truck-sized hole in your argument is talking about
| "the smallest test". First discoveries/demonstrations of
| interesting phenomenons don't typically happen at the
| smallest scale (why would they?).
| T-A wrote:
| The first working transistors and engines were of the
| size which happened to be most convenient to work with.
| They could then be shrunk because fundamental physical
| limits to their size were far below human scale. Their
| inventors were neither constrained by nor interested in
| those fundamental physical limits. They were _inventors_
| , not scientists.
|
| In contrast, a particle accelerator like the LHC is
| designed from the outset to explore physics at a given
| energy scale at the lowest possible cost. Shrink it any
| further and it will no longer work. Despite decades of
| attempts to come up with alternative designs, when time
| comes to draw up plans for a successor capable of pushing
| to even higher energy, it's just more of the same:
|
| https://home.cern/science/accelerators/future-circular-
| colli...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Because if it were possible to (say) find the Higgs boson
| at a smaller scale, they would have done that.
| mmooss wrote:
| You're in an IT forum and can't imagine implementations of
| both the smallest and largest scales? ICs are built at
| nanoscale and have to deal with quantum effects. PNT systems
| are so large that they have to deal with the speed of light
| and relativistic effects.
|
| Many things humanity builds are on the scale of colliders.
|
| > The problem is that fundamental physics
|
| I didn't know there was a problem. It seems like one of
| humanity's greatest successes.
| pfdietz wrote:
| You are mistating my argument. An honest reading, where you
| try to read what I wrote in the way that makes the most
| sense, would have concluded I was talking about large
| scale, not small scale.
| mmooss wrote:
| Maybe it's not dishonesty; maybe people can disagree
| genuinely; maybe others add their own points, and
| communication is difficult; maybe you even
| miscommunicated - such certainty and judgement is always
| a signal of not seeing other people's perspectives.
| Maybe, on a large scale, the world doesn't revolve around
| what you intend to say.
|
| As an example, I talked about both large and small scale.
| AIorNot wrote:
| I hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of
| this country
|
| (that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free
| science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over
| our national discourse)
|
| Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and
| Stony Brook was a great science minded university
|
| I'm not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game
| and we are not a country of data centers alone
| pfdietz wrote:
| At some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here?
| We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of
| fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes
| so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| We absolutely can, and I reckon we will... this is like a
| fraction of a percent of science funding which is a
| fraction of a percent of GDP, we spend more on maintaining
| warheads we can't use
|
| 10% of the US military budget _for one year_ could build a
| 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| It's not a question of "can", it's a question of "should".
| No one knows what discoveries can happen and what the
| spillover from them could be in the future. In essence,
| it's a bet, a moonshot.
| mmooss wrote:
| How can you look at current and recent US science and call
| it 'entitlement'? Have there been larger cuts anywhere in
| modern history?
| Insanity wrote:
| Nit: saying "this country" without context on where the
| parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.
|
| From context, you probably mean USA. And I'd agree, however
| the US was always more technology minded than scientifically
| minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries
| old ideology. So I don't think this is per se a new thing.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Why past tense? BNL will host the EIC, and SBU is going full
| steam.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| FYI the lab isn't shutting down. Glad you appreciate it's
| achievements though!
| mindslight wrote:
| You were not nearly harsh enough.
| Keyframe wrote:
| this particular collider or particle accelerators in general?
| Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.
| GreyZephyr wrote:
| The web would be one of the more well known technologies to
| come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole
| lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because
| of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors
| developed in colliders.
| gnufx wrote:
| Since when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you
| think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the
| Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable
| scientific success.
| atoav wrote:
| Yeah, one of them is used by you right now. The Internet.
| WJW wrote:
| https://physicsworld.com/a/what-have-particle-accelerators-e...
| juanjmanfredi wrote:
| Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among
| the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of
| digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle
| and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice
| versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest
| particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1].
| Another example more relevant to this post is when a few
| physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the
| large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN
| experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of
| the pioneers for DBaaS [2].
|
| [0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-
| of-...
|
| [1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-
| history-...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudant
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _has there been any discovery made with the help of a
| collider that found its way into an industrial product?_
|
| Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches
| on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
|
| If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have
| been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron
| radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron
| lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons
| are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3].
| (China has them too [4].)
|
| We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
|
| [2]
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
|
| [3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
|
| [4]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
| gnufx wrote:
| In the context of the article "collider" means intersecting
| particle beams, like in RHIC and LHC, which obviously
| involves rather low probability interactions, as opposed to
| accelerators which slam a beam into a dense target (like the
| SLAC accelerator). In a synchrotron light source you want the
| beam to circulate and specifically not collide with anything;
| they were developed from particle physics accelerators, of
| course.
| slashdave wrote:
| SLAC had a collider
| mgibbs63 wrote:
| I think there's a strong argument that the most useful product
| from collider science is the synchrotron light source.
| Researchers using collider rings realized that the x-ray
| synchrotron light these rings emit (an inconvenience to
| collider physics people) was a fantastic tool for structural
| biology and materials science. Eventually, they built dedicated
| electron storage rings that don't do collisions at all - the
| main goal is producing bright X-ray beams.
|
| Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete
| impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every
| day via studies in: - Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are
| good examples) - Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why
| batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs) - EUV
| photolithography techniques - Giant Magetoresistance (Important
| for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
| gnufx wrote:
| Indeed. The first dedicated light -- for various values of
| "light" -- source[1] repurposed the tunnel and various bits
| and techniques from the particle physics accelerator it
| replaced, and on which parasitic "light" measurements were
| made previously. See also [2].
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_Radiation_Source
|
| 2. https://www.ukri.org/publications/new-light-on-science-
| socio...
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider
| that found its way into an industrial product?
|
| Accelerators and colliders have had a profound impact on
| medical sciences. Nuclear isotopes used for nuclear medicine[1]
| is often produced by cyclotrons[2], the accelerator component
| of circular colliders. The detectors[3] used in things like PET
| scanners are based on detectors used in collision
| experiments[4]. Using protons to treat cancer was an idea that
| came directly from work on cyclotrons[5]. Using the tools
| developed to simulate how the collision fallout interact with
| the detectors at LHC[6] has been incorporated into radiotherapy
| to more accurately compute required doses[7][8].
|
| > perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity
| than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider
| data
|
| We are actually data starved, we have lots of good ideas but no
| way to test them.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_medicine#Sources_of_ra...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclotron
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_camera
|
| [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scintigraphy#Process
|
| [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy#History
|
| [6]: https://kt.cern/technologies/geant4
|
| [7]: https://aapm.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/mp.17678
|
| [8]:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240542832...
| whatshisface wrote:
| Colliders have been the source of almost everything we know
| about the fundamental nature of reality. That makes them a
| fruitful scientific direction.
| mmooss wrote:
| Very much yes: Knowledge is valuable itself. We're
| discovering the secrets of the universe.
|
| The owners of capital have created an amazing, self-serving
| ideology in the US (and elsehwere): If something doesn't help
| them make money, it's worthless. People seem to think that's
| part of the US - in the Declaration of Independence and
| Constitution.
|
| Even more amazing is that I hear scholars in non-profitable
| fields parrot those ideas. I think capitalism - and
| especially free markets - work well in many ways, but it's a
| means to an end, not a religion. Capitalism serves us, not
| vice-versa.
| thesmtsolver2 wrote:
| This is not a capitalism issue. During the communist
| revolution, scientists were persecuted if their work was
| too "intellectual" and didn't have immediate use.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_Old_Ninth
|
| https://www.culturalrevolutionceramics.com/object-
| details/do...
| mmooss wrote:
| The Church of Capitalism (as opposed to small-c
| capitalism) is the ideology of here and now; that's what
| I was talking about. The capitalist-communist dichotomy -
| a favorite of ideologues in both groups - is not
| something I was referring to.
| direwolf20 wrote:
| There can be more than one religion with similar beliefs.
| phongn wrote:
| Tevatron's construction program built up a lot of industrial
| capacity for superconducting magnets. This was by design, in
| the hopes that it would drive induced demand for them. One of
| the first beneficiaries were MRI machines, which became a lot
| more affordable to produce.
|
| The DOE hoped to repeat that success in the 1990s with the much
| larger SSC, but it was cancelled.
| slashdave wrote:
| > has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider
| that found its way into an industrial product?
|
| That's not why they were built
|
| > then letting it have a look at the collider data.
|
| I don't think you understand how collider data is analyzed
| direwolf20 wrote:
| What would that entity do exactly?
| tahoeskibum wrote:
| How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999
| when it was being made.
| syntaxing wrote:
| I worked at BNL during college days through the SULI program!
| Some of my peers from college is working there full time now too.
| I got to work on some really cool stuff but unfortunately a lot
| of the tenured researcher I knew have seem to left. I heard a lot
| of researchers left during Trump's first term.
| ephimetheus wrote:
| sPHENIX uses software that we've worked on at CERN to do some of
| their reconstruction!
| frob wrote:
| I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad
| school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We
| needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental
| season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once
| you get it there, it is go time all the time.
|
| You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since
| every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around
| doing little, probably working on other research, and then would
| need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back
| to collecting data.
|
| RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.
| divbzero wrote:
| Thanks for contributing to research.
|
| What was the "experimental season"? Why was there an
| experimental season vs. running RHIC all year?
| awjlogan wrote:
| Maintainance and upgrades. These big shared facilities they
| are shutdown regularly and researchers work flat out while
| they're up.
| scheme271 wrote:
| Doesn't power costs also affect shutdown periods? I know
| that CERN would shutdown in winter due to increased power
| costs and power demands around then. I suppose something
| similar may affect accelerators in the US.
| fyredge wrote:
| Cost of electricity. Accelerators consume huge amounts of
| power and require the appropriate infrastructure. For example
| in RIKEN, Japan, agreement is made beforehand with electric
| companies to provide power to the accelerator during specific
| spring and fall months, where demand for air conditioner and
| heaters are at the lowest.
| wildzzz wrote:
| NSRL is like $7k/hr and required over a dozen physicists when
| running the beam. The point is to get the most amount of
| experiments performed while everyone is available to do so.
| We would work like a 12 hour day when running tests at NSRL
| without any days off until we were done.
| vvpan wrote:
| My father worked on PHOENIX for over a decade and I got to watch
| all the equipment being assembled as a teen, unforgettable to
| have spent time so close to "big science". During budget cuts Jim
| Simons paid to keep the accelerator running.
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