Brookhaven Lab's RHIC concludes 25-year run with final collisions
hpcwire.com28 points by gnufx 3 hours ago
28 points by gnufx 3 hours ago
This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.
As I recall, RHIC itself replaced some cancelled project. I remember the tunnel being at least partly there in the mid-80s, with a plan to trundle ions from the tandem lab through a crazy long beamline across the site and stop nuclear structure research there as a result.
How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.
as a layperson, it seems the whole collider stuff has not been a very fruitful scientific direction so far (has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?)
maybe we are trying to 'jump' the tech tree too much - perhaps the first step was to create a much smarter entity than ourselves, and then letting it have a look at the collider data.
I think there's a strong argument that the most useful product from collider science is the synchrotron light source. Researchers using collider rings realized that the x-ray synchrotron light these rings emit (an inconvenience to collider physics people) was a fantastic tool for structural biology and materials science. Eventually, they built dedicated electron storage rings that don't do collisions at all - the main goal is producing bright X-ray beams.
Synchrotron light sources have had wide-ranging, concrete impacts on "industrial products" that you probably use every day via studies in: - Drug discovery (Tamiflu and Paxlovid are good examples) - Battery technology (X-ray studies of how/why batteries degrade over time has lead to better designs) - EUV photolithography techniques - Giant Magetoresistance (Important for high capacity spinning-disk hard drives)
> has there been any discovery made with the help of a collider that found its way into an industrial product?
Yes. SLAC has an excellent public-lecture series that touches on industrial uses of particle colliders [1].
If you want a concrete example, "four basic technologies have been developed to generate EUV light sources:" (1) synchrotron radiation, (2) discharge-produced plasma, (3) free-elecron lasers (FELs) and (4) laser-produced plasma [2]. Synchrotrons are circular colliders. FELs came out of linear colliders [3]. (China has them too [4].)
We have modern semiconductors because we built colliders.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M6sjEYCE2I&list=PLFDBBAE492...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S270947232...
[3] https://lcls.slac.stanford.edu
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Synchrotron_Radiation...
The web would be one of the more well known technologies to come out of running collider experiments. More directly a whole lot of medical imaging including PET is only possible because of either isotopes manufactured through colliders or sensors developed in colliders.
Particle physicists working on collider experiments were among the first people that needed to deal with large quantities of digitally stored data. As a result, advances in the particle and nuclear physics have fed advances in computing, and vice versa [0]. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, the largest particle physics and accelerator laboratory in the world [1]. Another example more relevant to this post is when a few physicists developed a CouchDB-based solution to handle the large amounts of data generated by their RHIC and CERN experiments. They spun that out into Cloudant, which was one of the pioneers for DBaaS [2].
[0] https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-coevolution-of-...
[1] https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-...
Since when were industrial products the purpose? Why do you think my colleagues can't analyse LHC data and discover the Higgs particle? The article says RHIC was a considerable scientific success.
this particular collider or particle accelerators in general? Cyclotrons are rather useful, for example.
I hate to be harsh but this mentality is part of the decline of this country
(that is so evident with loss of manufacturing, open and free science and tech robber barons oligarchs that have taken over our national discourse)
Brookhaven was instrumental to Nobel winning discoveries and Stony Brook was a great science minded university
I’m not opposed to investing in AI but its not a zero sum game and we are not a country of data centers alone
Nit: saying “this country” without context on where the parent poster is from or where you are from is kinda useless.
From context, you probably mean USA. And I’d agree, however the US was always more technology minded than scientifically minded, and the parent poster lines up with that centuries old ideology. So I don’t think this is per se a new thing.
At some point physics entitlement has to end -- why not here? We can't just keep scaling up the size and cost of fundamental physics experiments. Eventually the cost becomes so large that platitudinous arguments for them don't work.
It's not a question of "can", it's a question of "should". No one knows what discoveries can happen and what the spillover from them could be in the future. In essence, it's a bet, a moonshot.
We absolutely can, and I reckon we will... this is like a fraction of a percent of science funding which is a fraction of a percent of GDP, we spend more on maintaining warheads we can't use
10% of the US military budget for one year could build a 100km collider, RHIC is 4km
What a nonsense argument. Spending like this has to be justified on its own merits, not because there is some other bad spending. The argument you are trying to make would justify spending on almost anything.
The point is that there's so much bad spending that by comparison this is practically nothing to shake a stick at, and it produces actual science.
Repeating a bad argument doesn't transmute it into a good argument. I already explained why your argument is invalid. Please reconsider your dogmatic and irrational support for this kind of spending.
Look at it this way: they are investigating phenomena that require a collider-sized object to see. So unless your application involves a collider sized object, it won't use any effect they discover.
The problem is that fundamental physics has moved too far beyond the scales where we operate.