In the high-energy physics community, all eyes have been on Europe for some time, as the Large Hadron Collider , or LHC, has proceeded in fits and starts to become, in 2009, the most powerful atom smasher the world has ever seen. But as the LHC has taken shape in an underground tunnel outside Geneva, colliders stateside have been fading into retirement. At the start of 2008 the U.S. had four colliders; if Fermilab’s Tevatron shuts down as planned in 2011 , the U.S. will soon be down to one: the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, or RHIC , at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. [More]
A look inside RHIC, Brookhaven’s little big bang machine
