U.S. physicists have bid farewell to the nation's last remaining particle collider, which spun gold into revolutionary discoveries

"When the universe first burst into being, all of space was a cosmic cauldron filled with a roiling, fiery liquid of fundamental particles heated to trillions of degrees. But this seething primordial soupthe stuff of future galaxies, stars, planets and peopleonly lasted a few microseconds. Matter's more ordinary building blocks, protons and neutrons, settled out of it as the universe expanded and cooled, and the strange stuff vanished, never to be seen again."

"And for the past quarter-century it's done just that, again and again, making this revolutionary replication of the early universe seem almost routine. During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature's thorniest force, and its most fundamental constituents. It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton's spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before."

When the universe began, space contained a roiling plasma of fundamental particles heated to trillions of degrees that lasted only microseconds. Protons and neutrons formed as the universe expanded and cooled, and the primordial plasma vanished. Decades later, Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island recreated that primordial state by colliding heavy nuclei near light speed, producing short-lived subatomic fireballs. Over 25 years, RHIC generated unprecedented antimatter assemblages, probed quantum chromodynamics and proton spin, and provided experimental insight into conditions close to the big bang, before concluding its run.

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