Bertram Schwarzschild's Issues and
Events piece on the National Research Council's report Revealing the Hidden Nature of Space
and Time (PHYSICS TODAY, June 2006, page 26) states, "Fermilab's Tevatron is unlikely to outlive
the decade. Neither is the PEP-II asymmetric electron–positron collider at SLAC nor the
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory."
Placing RHIC in this context
is odd since the NRC report nowhere mentions it. RHIC is funded by the Office of Nuclear Physics in
the US Department of Energy's Office of Science, not by the Office of High Energy Physics, for which
the NRC committee was charged with recommending priorities for the next 15 years.
More important, the notion
that RHIC is "unlikely to outlive the decade" is misbegotten. The scientific impact of RHIC has
been outstanding; its discovery of the "perfect liquid" of quarks and gluons was named the number-one
physics story of 2005 by the American Institute of Physics publication Physics News Update
and garnered media coverage around the world.
Brookhaven National Laboratory
is currently working with the Office of Nuclear Physics to implement for RHIC a strategy for the
period 2006–11 aimed at a 10-fold luminosity upgrade and detector upgrades. This strategy
will place RHIC at the forefront of research in high-temperature quantum chromodynamics (QCD)
for at least another 10 years. Furthermore, RHIC is the first and only hadron collider with the ability
to accelerate, store, and collide polarized protons at energies up to 500 GeV in the center-of-mass
frame. It therefore provides unique opportunities to study the spin content of the nucleon—a
program that also will extend into the next decade.
Beyond that is the prospect
of using RHIC as the basis for a polarized electron–ion collider, an option for an international
next-generation facility for the study of QCD. That option will be discussed by the Nuclear Science
Advisory Committee in 2007 as it develops its long-range plan for the field. If longevity is based
on compelling science to be done, such a QCD facility—with ion–ion, proton–ion,
polarized proton–proton, polarized electron–proton, and electron–ion
collisions at high energy—would likely outlive the next decade.
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