For those of you who care,
RHIC - Relativistic Heavy Ion Colliders at Brookhaven National
Lab - has been given permission to start up its beam. That means soon
(matter of hours) there will Au beams whizzing around at high energies.
These collisions will create the highest energy densities seen in the
labs yet. This is only an "engineering run" which means it is for the
accelerator physicists to learn about their machine and work out the
kinks (not that this process isn't always on-going). The data taking
will start in October (Start of Fiscal Year 2000 for the government).
When the machine comes up to full power and beam density (luminosity),
then data will be taken at the rate of 250 MB/s. Can't wait. thanks
for bearing with me.