SCIENTISTS and engineers toiling on a new $600 million device touted as a tool that will extend the frontiers of science are beginning to sound a little frustrated by delays in the first major milestone in a months-long startup procedure.
Over the last several weeks, Brookhaven National Laboratory scientists and engineers have been trying to start up the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, called RHIC, which will accelerate gold ions -- atoms stripped of their electrons -- to nearly the speed of light, then smash the ions together in an attempt to re-create a state of matter that existed moments after the Big Bang, the event that scientists believe began the universe. This primordial state of matter, called the quark-gluon plasma, has never been observed since.
As a first step, RHIC engineers have been trying to move bunches of gold ions into the collider, send the bunches off to coast around one of RHIC's two rings, called the blue ring, then accelerate the ions. Once the blue ring is running, the process will be repeated for the yellow ring, in which the ions travel in the opposite direction. Eventually, the ions in the two rings will be steered into head-on collisions that are expected to heat nuclei to temperatures about 10,000 the temperature of the sun.
The full-blown experiments are scheduled to begin in the fall. But first, the rings have to work right.
''We are seeing the beam around the blue ring, but it's not cleanly established at this time,'' Satoshi Ozaki, the RHIC project director, said on Tuesday. ''It's going to take some time, a week or two.''Continue reading the main story
Dr. Ozaki said the only unexpected problem was the heat wave over the Fourth of July weekend. When the temperature climbed above 100 degrees, workers resorted to low-tech garden hoses to spray water on the roof of an overheated building that houses RHIC power supplies.
The target date to get ions orbiting and accelerating in the blue ring is the end of July, so the project is not officially behind schedule. But any slippage could have wider reverberations at Brookhaven National Laboratory, one of the country's premier research centers.
B.N.L., operated by the Department of Energy, has been dealt a severe blow by a string of unwelcome developments relating to safety and the environment. Its main nuclear research reactor, a key component among the dozens of research facilities on the site, has been closed after it was discovered in 1997 to be leaking radioactive tritium, and other chemical or radioactive contaminations resulting from 40 years of experiments have been found on its sprawling 5,300-acre campus, which, like everything on Long Island, sits atop the aquifer that supplies the Island's drinking water.
A successful launch of the RHIC project could give B.N.L. a much-needed image boost and help quiet the critics who argue that the lab should not be trusted to safely restart the reactor -- or that B.N.L. should be shut down altogether.
Energy Secretary Bill Richardson is scheduled to decide by year's end whether to permit the restart of the reactor. A success with RHIC may make a favorable decision easier.
''We now have improved understanding of the machine and we have started understanding it quite well,'' Dr. Ozaki said in estimating the chances of reaching RHIC's first target date. ''I think we can make it. In fact, I believe we will make it.''
RHIC's size and complexity set it apart from other particle accelerators. The earliest cyclotrons, dating back to the 1930's, were table-top sized rings that could control a particle beam using a single large magnet. By contrast, RHIC is 2.4 miles in circumference and requires 1,740 superconducting magnets to steer bunches of ions into one another as they travel at close to the speed of light. RHIC also stands apart from other modern accelerators like the Tevatron collider at Fermi Laboratory in Chicago, which propels particles around a single ring. Not only must RHIC control separate beams in separate rings, but superconducting magnets must also bend the beams around six different crossover points where some ions will collide, while the remainder of the ions continue racing toward the next collision chamber built into the ring.
''The beam goes very smoothly at arc sections,'' Dr. Ozaki said. ''But the crossing over with the bend in the middle is a tricky thing and we have to cross that over from one side to the other cleanly.''
The main problem for scientists d is tuning the computerized system that controls power supplies providing current to the RHIC magnets. The superconducting magnets, so named because they conduct electricity with no resistance at minus-450 degrees Fahrenheit, are the heart of RHIC's guidance system.
In an attempt to change the perception of Brookhaven National Lab as a cloistered neighbor with little interest in environmental safety, the lab's director, John Marburger, and his staff have begun a public relations campaign to gain public support for RHIC. Scientists insist that the danger to the environment or to residents and workers from RHIC is negligible and they have opened the project to inspection through public tours and a recent string of round-table discussions. Environmental groups responded positively to the discussions and have taken a slightly less aggressive stance against the RHIC project, though some are still wary of scientists' reassurances.
''Public comment and interaction with these mechanisms are not perfect, but they're better than we've gotten at this facility,'' said Scott Cullen, attorney for the anti-nuclear watchdog group called Standing for Truth About Radiation, or STAR. ''My problem is more the bigger picture and that they're doing this thing before they've done a full environmental impact study.''
According to Dr. Stephen Musolino, a physicist working on the environmental safety systems of RHIC, if a person were to stand on the earthen berm that covers most of the circle while gold ions whirred around the subterranean ring during normal operation, the person would receive no radiation at all.
Radiation is not produced by RHIC during normal operation, Dr. Musolino said, but it does result when the ion beam goes off track or is steered into a ''beam stop'' -- the nuclear equivalent of a brick wall.
At a round-table discussion three weeks ago, Dr. Musolino said that a person living near the perimeter closest to RHIC continuously for one year would be exposed to less than half a millirem of radiation from neutrons scattering into the air above the berm. By comparison, the amount of radiation received from natural sources, like cosmic radiation and rocks and soils, in the same period would be 360 millirem.
The Department of Energy estimates that the ion beam could be lost accidentally about once every three or four years, according to the environmental assessment report on RHIC. In that case, a person standing atop the berm would receive 34 millirems of radiation.
Rita Biss, a nearby Ridge resident who said she worked for 40 years as a microwave engineer in private industry, found the discussions with RHIC scientists reassuring.
''I've been coming here for three or four years,'' she said after one recent meeting. ''If they were telling lies, you would hear discrepancies. I think they're telling the truth.''
The Department of Energy also seems satisfied with the progress RHIC scientists are making.
''RHIC is a very big and complex machine and starting it for the first time requires a very deliberate and quite demanding process,'' said Michael Holland, director of project management for the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory office. ''I think it will lead to RHIC producing some very remarkable science.''Continue reading the main story