A recent celebration in the assembly area at Brookhaven’s RHIC Magnet Facility marked the completion of magnet production for the laboratory’s RHIC Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. Among those noting the successful achievement of a milestone within two weeks of a schedule set three years earlier were: RHIC Project Director Satoshi Ozaki; Brookhaven Director John Marburger; Martha Krebs, Director of the Office of Science of the US Department of Energy (DOE); and Acting Director of DOE’s Division of Nuclear Physics Dennis Kovar.
In total, some 1800 RHIC magnets have been assembled and/or tested at the Magnet Facility. These contained over 21 million metres of superconducting wire and required over 900 000 technician hours for manufacture. Installation of the magnets is scheduled to be complete by the end of the year. This will be followed by subsystem tests beginning in January 1999, and beam tests in March. Following partial installation of RHIC detectors, a low intensity engineering run is scheduled for July, when the first collisions in RHIC are expected. After a long and arduous preparation, RHIC will take its place at the forefront of world physics.
Brookhaven’s venerable AGS Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, commissioned in 1960, recently reached a record intensity of 6.82×1013 protons/pulse. The AGS will soon take on a new role, supplying beams of ions to feed RHIC.
