A perfect liquid at the dawn of time
Inside a 2.4-mile (3.8-kilometer) circular tunnel, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) accelerates two beams of gold ions in opposite directions to 99.995% of the speed of light. When these ions collide, they create conditions not seen since the universe was microseconds old. The immense energy from the collision melts protons and neutrons, releasing their constituent quarks and gluons. For a fraction of a second, this forms a quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that is simultaneously one of the hottest and most fluid liquids ever created in a lab.
The temperature inside these collisions reaches an astonishing 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion Fahrenheit), which is about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. Physicists initially predicted this plasma would behave like a gas. Instead, experiments at RHIC revealed it flows with almost no viscosity, making it a nearly "perfect" liquid. This swirling fluid also spins faster than any other known fluid, a property called vorticity that helps scientists study the powerful magnetic fields generated in the collisions. Studying this primordial soup shows the forces that shaped the early universe.
From fundamental particles to medical breakthroughs
Brookhaven National Laboratory is not limited to recreating the Big Bang. The 5,300-acre campus has several research facilities. One important facility is the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II). This facility is not a collider but a particle accelerator that generates beams of X-rays, ultraviolet, and infrared light 10,000 times brighter than its predecessor. Researchers from around the world use these intense beams to study the atomic structure of everything from batteries and fossils to proteins and semiconductors. The NSLS-II's half-mile-long ring accelerates electrons to 3 billion electron-volts to produce its powerful light.
Work at Brookhaven has led to seven Nobel Prizes. Discoveries made here include the muon neutrino in 1962, which showed that not all neutrinos were the same, and the J/psi particle in 1976, which provided confirmation of the existence of the charm quark. BNL research has also had a direct impact on medicine. Scientists developed technetium-99m, now the most widely used radioisotope for medical imaging, and thallium-201, used in cardiac stress tests.