An aerial view of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY. Using the existing Alternating Gradient Synchrotron as an injector, heavy atoms will be accelerated to high energies and then smashed head-on in the hope of making quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter in which the quarks inside protons and neutrons will blend together in a high-energy soup.
