February 7, 2026
Atoms smashed, comments clash
Brookhaven Lab's RHIC Concludes 25-Year Run with Final Collisions
Goodbye atom smasher, hello new machine—fans cheer, skeptics jeer
TLDR: RHIC ended its 25-year run with final collisions and a massive data haul, paving the way for the new Electron‑Ion Collider. Commenters split between excitement about the next machine, skepticism over real-world benefits, and insider talk about staff departures, with a quick radiation safety myth-bust along the way.
Brookhaven’s giant atom smasher, RHIC (a 2.4‑mile ring that slams atomic bits together), took its final bow after 25 years—and the comments section promptly collided. The lab’s last run churned out a jaw‑dropping dataset, with the sPHENIX “fast camera” grabbing 200 petabytes (think 200 million gigabytes) and 40 billion snapshots of hot, squishy matter. Meanwhile, the crowd sprinted to the real headline: this clears the way for the next machine, the Electron‑Ion Collider, or EIC, which will re‑use RHIC’s tunnel link. “This is prep for the EIC,” one user announced, planting the flag for Team Hype.
Then the skeptics crashed in: a layperson asked if any collider discoveries ever show up in everyday products, tossing shade at “jumping the tech tree” and joking we might need a smarter AI to figure it all out. Nostalgia rolled in—tour memories from 1999—before the thread swerved into workplace drama, with an alum saying many tenured researchers left during Trump’s first term. A safety side‑quest erupted, too, until a commenter calmly myth‑busted radiation fears: Cesium‑137 is a gamma emitter and doesn’t make nearby stuff radioactive. Memes flew (“40 billion selfies of quark soup”), and the room split into three camps: future‑is‑bright hype, practical‑value skeptics, and lab‑life storytellers. Science ends a chapter; the comments wrote the sequel.
Key Points
- •RHIC at Brookhaven Lab ended its 25-year program on Feb. 6, 2026 with final oxygen-ion collisions in STAR and sPHENIX.
- •DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil marked the end of RHIC’s final run and highlighted plans for the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) reusing RHIC components.
- •RHIC surpassed design goals in collision rates, energy ranges, ion species diversity, and proton spin polarization, according to C-AD chair Wolfram Fischer.
- •The final run produced RHIC’s largest dataset, including high-energy gold-ion, proton-proton, low-energy fixed-target (beam energy scan), and oxygen-oxygen collisions.
- •sPHENIX generated over 200 petabytes of raw data in 2026, including 40 billion snapshots of matter from gold-ion collisions; prior detectors STAR, PHENIX, PHOBOS, and BRAHMS contributed earlier data.