Brookhaven’s RHIC wraps up operations

Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is on its final run and will shut down to make room for a new accelerator, ending more than two decades of U.S. experiments that recreated quark‑gluon plasma. The article reviews RHIC’s history (DOE approval in 1992, operations since 2000), notes the program’s scientific legacy in demonstrating lab‑made QGP, and explains that continued QGP studies will increasingly rely on CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.