Experimental physicists have constructed four experiments large at RHIC, with more planned for the future. The two largest experiments, STAR and PHENIX, have more than 400 members each. The two smaller ones, BRAHMS and PHOBOS, have dozens of members. Hundreds of engineers, technicians and others have helped to design and build these experiments. Shown below is a map of all the countries involved in RHIC experiments.

They are: Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Norway, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.

RHIC's ring and associated systems were designed by Brookhaven's renowned accelerator physicists, who planned every part of the collider with both physics and safety in mind. Meanwhile, dozens of theoretical physicists around the world are working to interpret RHIC's first results. 

RHIC is also used to help train the next generation of physicists, who come to Brookhaven to gain direct experience in high energy physics. Shown below are the participants of a 1998 RHIC physics summer workshop.

 

Hundreds of people from Brookhaven National Laboratory and businesses on Long Island have worked to build RHIC and its experiments. They include engineers, construction workers, technicians, welders, electricians, and more. Dozens more Brookhaven staff operate and maintain RHIC or assist the experimenters when they come to Brookhaven. Here's a picture of many of those who designed and built RHIC's 1,700 superconducting magnets.

RHIC has been one of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) largest construction projects for nearly a decade. At 2.4 miles around, and with thousands of scientists eagerly awaiting the latest data, RHIC is quite literally one of the biggest things happening in nuclear physics today. Its funding comes primarily from DOE's Division of Nuclear Physics, in the Office of Science.

DOE researchers are crucial to RHIC's success, making up almost a quarter of the thousand-member RHIC community. Nearly 250 of them, from seven DOE laboratories, have worked together with university scientists and colleagues from 15 other nations to build the four major experiments around the RHIC ring.

DOE laboratories have designed and built many of the complex systems for each experiment. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, for example, built the centerpiece detector of the STAR experiment, called the Time Projection Chamber. Los Alamos National Laboratory has a lead role in the muon arm, a major component of the PHENIX experiment.

Also on PHENIX, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory designed engineered the giant steel magnets that form the core of this 3,000-ton device, while Oak Ridge National Laboratory has designed and built a major fraction of the experiment's readout electronics and the Ames Laboratory has developed its particle-selection trigger. Argonne National Laboratory scientists are working on several of the main detectors for the PHOBOS experiment and the Electromagnetic Calorimeter detector for STAR. Brookhaven physicists lead the construction management of PHENIX, form the backbone of the BRAHMS experiment collaboration, and are well represented on the other two experiments.

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