Getting the Most Bang Out of Quarks and Gluons
New York Times
May 6, 2007
By Corey Kilgannon
A group of men viewing wide-screen monitors in a control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory the other day were rooting for very different collisions, ones made by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced rick). These images showed up spectacularly on screens like fireworks, depicting the aftermath of atomic collisions. One of the six researchers in the control room, Jim Sowinski, 52, a physicist from Indiana University, compared the analysis of the collisions with police investigation and reconstruction of traffic accidents. "The difference is, we're putting all the cars in the same lane running straight at each other," he said. "Then we watch the results. Some are fender benders, and some are head-ons."
Read the entire article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/06/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/06colli.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Learn more about the IU Department of Physics: http://www.physics.indiana.edu/
