10 The Largest Accelerators and Colliders of Their Time
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10.2 RHIC 1
T. Roser
10.2.1 The RHIC Facility
With its two independent superconducting rings RHIC is a highly flexible collider
of hadron beams ranging from intense beams of polarized protons to fully stripped
gold ions [69, 70]. The layout of the RHIC accelerator complex is shown in
Fig. 10.1. The collision of 100 GeV/nucleon gold ions probes the conditions of
the early universe by producing extreme conditions where quarks and gluons are
forming a new state of matter, the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma. Several
runs of high luminosity gold-gold collisions as well as comparison runs using
proton, deuteron and copper beams have demonstrated that indeed a new state of
matter with extreme density is formed in the RHIC gold-gold collisions. (See also
Sect. 11.5).
IR 10
IR 12
IR 2
IR 4 [RF]
IR 6 [STAR]
IR 8 [PHENIX]
High Intensity Proton Source
RHIC
EBIS BOOSTER
LINAC
Pol.Proton Source
1 MeV/n
Q = +32
AGS
9 GeV/n
Q = +79
TANDEMS
Fig. 10.1 Layout of RHIC and the injector accelerators. The gold ions are stepwise ionized as
they are accelerated to RHIC injection energy
1 This manuscript has been authored by Brookhaven Science Associates, LLC under Contract
No. DE-SC0012704 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The United States Government retains
and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the United States
Government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or
reproduce the published form of this manuscript, or allow others to do so, for United States
Government purposes.