The Future
RHIC began operation in 2000 and until November 2010 was the most powerful heavy-ion collider in the world. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of CERN, while used mainly for colliding protons, operates with heavy ions for about one month per year. LHC will eventually operate 28 times higher ion energies, although current LHC operation is at half this energy. As of 2012 RHIC and the LHC are the only operating hadron colliders in the world.
Due to the longer operating time per year, a greater number of colliding ion species and collision energies can be studied at RHIC. In addition and unlike the LHC, RHIC is able to accelerate spin polarized protons, which would leave RHIC as the world's highest energy accelerator for studying spin-polarized proton structure.
A planned major upgrade is eRHIC: The construction of a 10 GeV high intensity electron/positron beam facility, allowing electron-ion collisions. At least one new detector will have to be built to study the collisions. A recent review is given by A. Deshpande et al..
In October 2006, then Interim Director of BNL, Sam Aronson, has contested the claim in a Physics Today report that "Tevatron is unlikely to outlive the decade. Neither is ... the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider", referring to a report of the National Research Council.
Read more about this topic: Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
Famous quotes containing the words the future and/or future:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“I will be steel!
I will build a steel bridge over my need!
I will build a bomb shelter over my heart!
But my future is a secret.
It is as shy as a mole.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“The Mind in Infancy is, methinks, like the Body in Embrio, and receives Impressions so forcible, that they are as hard to be removed by Reason, as any Mark with which a Child is born is to be taken away by any future Application.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)