Brookhaven lab collider smashes final atoms after 25 years of innovative research

Officials 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.

“It has transformed our understanding of matter,” said Dario Gil, undersecretary for science at the U.S. Department of Energy, during a daylong visit to the lab. He called the work “an extraordinary success," after pushing the button for the last collision by the collider.

Later, he announced a federal decision for the 2020-approved new Electron Ion Collider that includes an early funding round of $67 million for "long-lead" materials that will allow a critical early phase of work to move forward. “You made RHIC [the heavy-ion collider] a success and you are the reason [the Department of Energy] is confident of the future” of the next-level collider, Gil said.

The heavy-ion collider for the past 25 years conducted 300 trillion collisions of atoms of elements such as gold and uranium, stripping them of their electrons and accelerating to nearly the speed of light in a 2.4 mile underground tunnel. The immediate aftermath of those collisions provides a snapshots into what scientists believe are the origins of all matter in the universe.

The work has generated mountains of data that will continue to power research for coming years, even as work on the Electron-Ion Collider progresses toward its first experiments by the mid-2030s, officials said.

New York State has committed $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 transitioning to the new work.

Funding from Congress included years of work by Democratic U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, who called the facility a “smashing success,” and by Republican U.S. Rep. Nick LaLota, both of whom appeared via video.

The work gave scientists from 36 countries important new clues into how nearly massless quarks and gluons — the building blocks of matter — generate all visible matter, advancing and building on past work as groundbreaking as that of Albert Einstein.

“I believe he’d be amazed by it,” said John Hill, interim director of BNL, during a tour of the facility Friday. “Some of [Einstein’s] principles are embodied in these machines. We’re actually studying what it looked like right after the Big Bang. Einstein would be amazed by it all.”

Work on the electron collider will involve “thousands of businesses and engineers and technicians,” Gil said, collaborating to build the new machine.” Artificial intelligence will play an end-to-end role in the new collider, he said.

The new collider will provide deeper insights into the origin of matter, said Abhay Deshpande, associate BNL director. He compared the difference to smashing two watermelons together under the heavy-ion collider and slicing a watermelon with a knife with the new one.

“You can cut it in a controlled way with precision to understand [the material] much much better,” he said.

 Potential 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.

By Mark Harrington

mark.harrington@newsday.comMHarringtonNews

Mark Harrington, a Newsday reporter since 1999, covers energy, wineries, Indian affairs and fisheries.