Last week, Brookhaven National Lab hosted a press tour of their Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, one of only two active particle colliders in the US. The tour also included a briefing on the work that Brookhaven scientists are doing at CERN's Large Hadron Collider. We'll cover the information in more detail in the near future, but we wanted to share some of the great photos we were able to take during the tour.

Brookhaven's Peter Steinberg, whose session at last year's AAAS meeting received some coverage here, joined us for the bus ride out. He described how RHIC, although lower energy than the Tevatron or LHC, remains relevant because it specializes in colliding the nuclei of heavy atoms—in this case, gold ions. When they collide, the high density and energy creates a small area in which the components of the nuclei, the quarks and gluons, are liberated, forming a single high energy soup. (The LHC is also scheduled to spend part of its time colliding lead nuclei to similar effect.)

Brookhaven is also the primary US center for the ATLAS detector at the LHC, and discussions of its role in building and running that detector bookended the tour of the RHIC. Brookhaven is helping produce an LHC popup book that will go on sale at Amazon shortly.

The LHC resides below ground, and the popup book raises the French/Swiss countryside to scale using the access tunnels.

The book was a big hit with the press in attendance, and had some really nice graphics

A medium-sized bang leaps out of the pages.

Brookhaven helped with the design and construction of the ATLAS detector, and hardware similar to what's soon to be back in operation were in the conference room.

A gridded metal detector like the one shown here will detect muons produced by the collision.

The energies of the particles produced by the collisions will be measured in ATLAS using a liquid argon-cooled calorimeter, which includes some basic signal processing hardware.

A model of the calorimeter and some of its associated electronics.

We received an extensive briefing from the US ATLAS program head, Howard Gordon, who was joined by some of Brookhaven's staff at the LHC via videoconference.