Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Witness the final particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where scientists have been smashing atoms since the summer of 2000.
Beams of ions — atoms stripped of their electrons — will circulate through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference RHIC rings and crash into one another at nearly the speed of light for the final time, capping off a quarter century of groundbreaking discoveries and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing.
Join us in officially ending the RHIC operations era, celebrating RHIC's remarkable successes, and marking the transition of RHIC into a new state-of-the-art nuclear physics research machine, the world's first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider.
Witness the final particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where scientists have been smashing atoms since the summer of 2000.
Beams of ions — atoms stripped of their electrons — will circulate through the twin 2.4-mile-circumference RHIC rings and crash into one another at nearly the speed of light for the final time, capping off a quarter century of groundbreaking discoveries and technological advances in accelerators, detectors, and computing.
Join us in officially ending the RHIC operations era, celebrating RHIC's remarkable successes, and marking the transition of RHIC into a new state-of-the-art nuclear physics research machine, the world's first fully polarized Electron-Ion Collider.
