Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) closed its 25‑year chapter after a final burst of oxygen‑ion collisions at nearly light speed. The event, witnessed by DOE Under Secretary Darío Gil and interim director John Hill, marked the end of a program that pushed accelerator limits and produced the largest ever dataset.

Over its run, RHIC collided ten atomic species across a spectrum of energies, revealing the quark‑gluon plasma that existed microseconds after the Big Bang. The collider’s polarized proton beams also opened a new window on proton spin, a property that underpins technologies from MRI to quantum sensors.

Fact: RHIC’s sPHENIX detector recorded over 200 petabytes of raw data in 2025, surpassing all previous RHIC datasets combined.

Data from the final run will feed into the upcoming Electron‑Ion Collider, which will reuse RHIC’s major components. Scientists expect the new facility to probe deeper into the strong force and refine models of nuclear matter. Brookhaven’s legacy demonstrates how sustained investment in high‑energy physics yields transformative insights.