New York investing $100 million into Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory
Construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is slated to begin in 2025.
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A major project is in the works at Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Construction of the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) is slated to begin in 2025.
New York is investing $100 million in the project, which is estimated to cost more than $2 billion.
“What we’re doing is tapping into a new frontier,” said Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado. “The world is watching what we do here and I think it’s important for us to take a lot of pride in that fact.”
Abhay Deshpande is the director of Electron Ion Science at BNL.
He explained that “every one of us is built of particles called protons…and neutrons, very similar to protons, and they form the nucleus of everything that we see around us…”
Deshpande said with this collider, they are aiming to study, internally, how protons and neutrons are formed.
Deshpande said there are about 500 people at BNL who are directly and indirectly working on aspects of this project. Add to that 1,400 scientists from around the world who Deshpande says want to go there and work on it.
According to Brookhaven National Laboratory’s website:
“The EIC will be a particle accelerator that collides electrons with protons and nuclei to produce snapshots of those particles’ internal structure—like a CT scanner for atoms. The electron beam will reveal the arrangement of the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of nuclei. The force that holds quarks together, carried by the gluons, is the strongest force in Nature. The EIC will allow us to study this “strong nuclear force” and the role of gluons in the matter within and all around us. What we learn from the EIC could power the technologies of tomorrow.”
“The best part of discovery science is that we have no way of knowing really what we’re going to find, and who can say what breakthroughs lie ahead? Who can say what puzzles we’ll solve or what technologies we will be creating? And this is why we invest in basic science," said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
The project is expected to bring hundreds of jobs to Long Island and will take about eight years to complete.
