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This is in preparation for starting construction work on the Electron-Ion-Collider (EIC) which will use the same tunnel and experiment locations.

How time passes! I remember touring the RHIC tunnels back in 1999 when it was being made.

sPHENIX uses software that we’ve worked on at CERN to do some of their reconstruction!

I spent days and days inside the STAR control room in grad school, often during the 12:30am-7:30am graveyard shift. We needed to run 24/7 for efficiency reasons during the experimental season. Getting superconductors down to temp is costly, so once you get it there, it is go time all the time.

You had to stay on top of all the detectors and triggers, since every minute of beam time cost around $1k. You often sat around doing little, probably working on other research, and then would need to drop everything to reboot a detector so we could get back to collecting data.

RHIC is dead. Long live eRHIC.

I worked at BNL during college days through the SULI program! Some of my peers from college is working there full time now too. I got to work on some really cool stuff but unfortunately a lot of the tenured researcher I knew have seem to left. I heard a lot of researchers left during Trump’s first term.

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.