February 22, 1999

Back to the Beginning: The Time Projection Chamber
 
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With the help of the U.S. Air Force, we used a giant C5A cargo plane to fly the Time Projection Chamber to Brookhaven National Laboratory outside of New York City to be mated with the rest of STAR. At Brookhaven, scientists are building a machine that should be able to recreate conditions that existed in the first moment after the birth of the Universe. The machine is a mammoth example of what used to be called an atom smasher. Scientists prefer the term "accelerator" or "collider," and they have named this collider the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC.