The Quest for High Luminosity in Hadron Colliders (413th Brookhaven Lecture)

In 1909, by bombarding a gold foil with alpha particles from a radioactive source, Ernest Rutherford and coworkers learned that the atom is made of a nucleus surrounded by an electron cloud. Ever since, scientists have been probing deeper and deeper into the structure of matter using the same technique. With increasingly powerful machines, they accelerate beams of particles to higher and higher energies, to penetrate more forcefully into the matter being investigated and reveal more about the contents and behavior of the unknown particle world. To achieve the highest collision energies, projectile particles must be as heavy as possible, and collide not with a fixed target but another beam traveling in the opposite direction. These experiments are done in machines called hadron colliders, which are some of the largest and most complex research tools in science. Five such machines have been built and operated, with Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) currently the record holder for the total collision energy. One more such machine is under construction. Colliders have two vital performance parameters on which their success depends: one is their collision energy, and the other, the number of particle collisions they can produce, which is proportional to a quantity known as the luminosity. One of the tremendous achievements in the world's latest collider, RHIC, is the amazing luminosity that it produces in addition to its high energy. To learn about the performance evolution of these colliders and the way almost insurmountable difficulties can be overcome, especially in RHIC, join Wolfram Fischer, a physicist in the Collider-Accelerator (C-A) Department, who will give the next Brookhaven Lecture, on 'The Quest for High Luminosity in Hadron Colliders.'