**RHIC talking points for Summer Sundays**

# To excite people about what's going on at RHIC, focus on the contrasts and fascinating facts and why the average person should care about the research. These talking points follow a narrative format, but can be used in any order you see fit. Feel free to pick and choose and use those points that best address any questions you might receive.

RHIC is the only place on Earth right now to do the research we do. This
research is mostly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of
Science, but it attracts scientists (and some additional research money)
from all over the world -- Brazil, China, Croatia, France, Japan,
Russia, and more. These scientists are excited to tell you about the
work they do. Please try to be patient with their accents and don't
hesitate to ask questions.

We use a giant accelerator, 2.4 miles around, to look at the smallest
known pieces of matter -- (the tiny quarks and gluons that make up
protons and neutrons inside atoms).

In some ways RHIC is like a telescope that looks back in time to mere
fractions of a second after the beginning of the universe. Our recent
findings show that we're getting a glimpse of what matter looked like in
the hot, dense "soup" that existed just after the Big Bang.

The accelerator is made of more than 1,700 superconducting magnets that
push and steer beams of gold ions (gold atoms without electrons) around
the RHIC "racetrack" more than 80,000 times per second.

"Superconducting" means electricity flows through the magnets with no
resistance; the electric current is what creates the magnetic field that
pushes and steers the gold ions.

The ions are moving at nearly the speed of light.

The accelerator is actually two rings; one beam circulates clockwise,
the other counterclockwise.

At four points where the rings cross, we have built complex detectors
that act like giant digital cameras to analyze what happens when the
beams collide.

Thousands of collisions take place every second.

Analyzing what happens in these collisions allows us to explore the very
smallest, most fundamental bits of matter and how they interact.

This research is part of an age-old scientific search for the smallest
pieces -- the most fundamental building blocks -- of the universe and
everything in it.

It's part of human nature to want to understand the world around us.

Understanding matter at this level may help us understand how the
universe evolved to be the way it is today.

It will also help us better understand the forces that hold everything
together in the world around us.

Today, hundreds of times every day, each of us uses modern technology
that relies on such a basic understanding of the microscopic structure
and properties of matter.

These technologies -- things like personal computers, medical imaging
devices, and cell phones -- could not have been created without the
basic understanding gained from experiments performed 50 to 100 years
ago that were similar to those now going on at RHIC, but at much lower
energies.

At that time, no one knew what those experiments would yield in terms of
new products.

Similarly, we can't say now how what we learn from RHIC will translate
into new discoveries or devices.

But if history is any indicator, every time something fundamental has
been learned about matter's structure, that knowledge has eventually
resulted in a benefit to humankind.

**More cool stuff:**

We supercool the magnets to minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit -- almost the
coldest anything can be. But when the collisions take place inside RHIC,
the temperature reaches more than a trillion degrees Fahrenheit, 40,000
times hotter than the center of the sun!

Don't worry, the matter at that temperature is a tiny speck smaller than
a single atom and lasts for just ten millionths of a billionth of a
billionth of a second.

To keep the magnets so cold, we use the largest refrigerator in the
world, which pipes in liquid helium \-- enough to fill all the balloons
in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for the next 100 years! (Helium is
readily available on Earth so the parade will go on.)

We don't use up much gold. In fact, in the 20 years we plan to run RHIC,
we'll use less than on millionth of a gram of gold -- less than in a
single wedding ring.