More than 1,000 physicists
from around the world use RHIC to explore the subatomic world.
Experimental physicists
have constructed four experiments large at RHIC, with more planned
for the future. The two largest experiments, STAR and PHENIX, have
more than 400 members each. The two smaller ones, BRAHMS and
PHOBOS, have dozens of members. Hundreds of engineers, technicians
and others have helped to design and build these experiments.
Shown below is a map of
all the countries involved in RHIC experiments.
They are: Brazil, Canada,
China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan,
Korea, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom
and the United States.
RHIC's ring and
associated systems were designed by Brookhaven's renowned
accelerator physicists, who planned every part of the collider with
both physics and safety in mind. Meanwhile,
dozens of theoretical physicists around the world are working to
interpret RHIC's first results.
RHIC is also used to help
train the next generation of physicists, who come to Brookhaven to
gain direct experience in high energy physics. Shown below are the
participants of a 1998 RHIC physics summer workshop.
Hundreds of people from
Brookhaven National Laboratory and businesses on Long Island have
worked to build RHIC and its experiments. They include engineers,
construction workers, technicians, welders, electricians, and more.
Dozens more Brookhaven staff
operate and maintain RHIC or assist the experimenters when they come
to Brookhaven. Here's
a picture of many of those who designed and built RHIC's 1,700
superconducting magnets.
RHIC has been one of the
U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) largest construction projects for
nearly a decade. At 2.4 miles around, and with thousands of
scientists eagerly awaiting the latest data, RHIC is quite literally
one of the biggest things happening in nuclear physics today. Its
funding comes primarily from DOE's Division of Nuclear Physics, in
the Office of Science.
DOE researchers are
crucial to RHIC's success, making up almost a quarter of the
thousand-member RHIC community. Nearly 250 of them, from seven DOE
laboratories, have worked together with university scientists and
colleagues from 15 other nations to build the four major experiments
around the RHIC ring.
DOE laboratories have
designed and built many of the complex systems for each experiment.
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example, built the
centerpiece detector of the STAR experiment,
called the Time Projection Chamber. Los Alamos National Laboratory
has a lead role in the muon arm, a major component of the PHENIX
experiment.
Also on PHENIX, Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory designed engineered the giant steel
magnets that form the core of this 3,000-ton device, while Oak Ridge
National Laboratory has designed and built a major fraction of the
experiment's readout electronics and the Ames Laboratory has
developed its particle-selection trigger. Argonne National
Laboratory scientists are working on several of the main detectors
for the PHOBOS experiment and the
Electromagnetic Calorimeter detector for STAR. Brookhaven physicists
lead the construction management of PHENIX, form the backbone of the
BRAHMS experiment collaboration, and are
well represented on the other two experiments.
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