 RHIC's beam
travels at
99.995% the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, or
300,000,000 meters per second).
RHIC's beam is not continuous --
instead, it's made up of 57 separate "bunches", each
containing billions of ions.
When the machine
runs, thousands of subatomic collisions take place each second.
Each collision sends out a
shower of thousands of subatomic particles.
 If quark-gluon plasma is formed
in a RHIC collision, it will last less than
0.00000000000000000000001 seconds.
The temperature inside a RHIC
collision is over trillion degrees, far hotter than the
center of the sun.
RHIC ions are so small that, even
at high speed, the force of their impact is about the same as
the impact of two mosquitoes colliding.
In 20 years of running, RHIC will
use less than one gram of gold.
RHIC's two concentric rings are
made up of 1,740 superconducting magnets, strung end-to-end like
beads on a necklace.
RHIC is powered by over 1,600
miles of superconducting niobium titanium wire, wrapped around the
RHIC magnets.
 To make the superconducting
magnets carry electricity without resistance, RHIC magnets are
bathed in liquid helium, at a temperature only about 4.5 degrees
above Absolute Zero, or minus 451.6 Fahrenheit! (Absolute Zero is
minus 273 Celsius, or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit. It's the
coldest that anything can be.)
In all, RHIC uses enough helium
to fill all the balloons in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades
for the next 100 years.
To get the helium chilled down,
RHIC's refrigerators draw 15 megawatts of electrical power. (One
megawatt is enough to power 1,000 homes.)
RHIC's two large experiments,
STAR and PHENIX, are bigger than houses. PHENIX weighs 3,000 tons
and STAR weights 1,200 tons.
|
