They highlight a particular facility on each of the Sunday tour. In this news report (more like a trip report), the writer went on the Summer Sunday tour that was highlighting the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It appears to be quite an extensive tours, with a look at the main detectors.
Our group then got on a bus headed for STAR, one of two detectors we would see. STAR stands for Solenoidal Tracker At Relativistic. Xian Li, a brilliant doctorate student, told us how heavy ions are smashed together in a structure that looks like a huge roulette wheel. Even more brilliant was a 12-year-old girl named Mikaela Egbert, who showed me how to use my cell phone to take pictures.
Our next stop was the other detector, PHENIX, which stands for Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interactions eXperiment. Aside from not being in Arizona, PHENIX also is where scientists collide heavy ions. Protons are collided in both detectors as well.
Sounds like fun! Don't you wish you could have been there?
Zz.
1 comment:
Symmetry mag seems to be checking you regularly now!
"Symmetry Mag is reading an amusing column in the Merced Sun-Star about a columnist's visit to Brookhaven National Laboratory. (h/t to the Physics and Physicists blog)."
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