The Lab has been closed the past few days because of the major blizzard that dumped more than 30 inches of snow over the weekend, but it’s not just the weather that’s been keeping things cool around Brookhaven.
The refrigeration system at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is humming to life today, beginning cool-down of the magnets in the 2.4-mile-circumference accelerator ring at Brookhaven Lab. Temperatures inside the magnets will ultimately reach a frigid four degrees Kelvin (-452 degrees Fahrenheit) as Run 13 at RHIC gets underway. When collisions begin next week, scientists from Brookhaven and around the world will collect data from particles emerging from the particle smashups to try to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the basic building blocks of matter—the puzzle of the proton’s “missing” spin.
