Brookhaven National Laboratory

The Brookhaven National Laboratory (Long Island, New York) was the first facility to employ a proton synchrotron, the 3 GeV Cosmotron in 1952. It was the first accelerator to reach 1 GeV of particle energy. By 1960 it had started operation with the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS). In 1970 it began the operation of its Tandem Van de Graaf accelerator. At present its main initiative in the particle field is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), seeking to create a quark-gluon plasma state to examine conditions which existed a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang.

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven is a synchrotron particle accelerator with a circumference of 4 kilometers. This puts it in the class with the largest accelerators in the world. It is being optimized for the acceleration of heavy ions, seeking to create a quark-gluon plasma state to examine conditions which existed a tiny fraction of a second after the big bang.

The bending magnets around the particle "racetrack" are liquid-helium-cooled superconducting magnets.

The experiments to date have involved accelerating two beams of gold ions in opposite directions around the circle and then directing them together for a collision experiment which may produce the sought-after quark-gluon plasma state.

Tandem Van de Graaf

Completed in 1970, the Tandem Van de Graaff facility at Brookhaven was for many years the world's largest electrostatic accelerator facility. " It can provide researchers with beams of more than 40 different types of ions -- atoms that have been stripped of their electrons. Ions ranging from hydrogen to uranium are available. The facility consists of two 15 million volt electrostatic accelerators, each about 24 meters long, aligned end-to-end. These may be used independently, or one machine may be used as the injector for the other. "

"To study heavy ion collisions at high energies, a 700 meter-long tunnel and beam transport system called the Heavy Ion Transport Line were completed in 1986, allowing the delivery of heavy ions from Tandem to the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS) for further acceleration. At the time, this modification opened an entirely new area of research at the AGS. The HITL now makes it possible for the Tandem to serve as the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider's ions source. "

NASA used the Tandem to do heavy ion bombardment to test components of the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft.