as foretoldhe Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider—among the most powerful heavy-ion colliders in the world, second only to CERN’s LHC—ran through its last particles and ceased operations on Friday.

This is really good news. Don’t worry, the shutdown has nothing to do with recently, the general disorder science has endured in the US RHIC actually “breaks” as Brookhaven National Laboratory, its operator, prepares to make room for its successor, the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC). This is interesting, as Brookhaven’s communication on EIC progress has been somewhat vague over the past two years.

but NEwS in the last run of the RHIC was accompanied by several important announcements that the EIC Really arrival and continues with decent government support, means particle physics in the US is not dead. If all goes well, by the mid-2030s, physicists will be better equipped to push the limits of physics.

“It’s good to sleep well for a while,” Travis Shrey, a Brookhaven scientist who coordinated the last RHIC run, said. Scientific American. “I’m excited to get to the finish line.”

“Big Bang machines” say good night

Located in Upton, New York, RHIC began operations in 2000. Its main goal is to study the internal structure of atoms, or more specifically, the strong force that holds quarks together.

That said, it’s worth noting that the US actually has several active particle accelerators—Fermilab in Illinois there are somefor example. Indeed, so is Brookhaven, and a good number that.

What sets RHIC apart, however, is that the collider packs enough power to ram heavier particles, such as gold ions, into each other. In contrast, most particle accelerators focus particle beams on specific targets or zap particles with X-rays. In short, colliders are a specific subset of accelerators that are both difficult to build and manage.

Before RHIC was closed, it was the only operational particle collider in the US and one of only two heavy-ion colliders in the world, the other being the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. In fact, the LHC will also go to break this summer for the same reason: to prepare for its own successor, the High-Luminosity LHC.

Looking at the future of physics

During its run, data from RHIC allowed physicists to make many groundbreaking discoveries. For example, this is the first facility of DISGUISE quark-gluon plasma, an amalgam of quarks and gluons believed to have filled the early universe. Just recently—two days before the closing—this CEBU how some spinning particles are made visible matter out of a quantum vacuum.

In addition, RHIC’s last run was actually the longest, meaning the machine collected more data than ever before. Analyzing everything will keep physicists busy for at least a decade, so RHIC science “will continue until we analyze all the data and publish all the papers,” Abhay Deshpande, Brookhaven’s associate director for nuclear and particle physics, said in a statement.

The EIC will literally be, in part, built from the remnants of the RHIC, including ion sources and superconducting magnets. The completed collider will be equipped with giant accelerator rings with a circumference of 2.4 miles (1.8 kilometers) and a house-sized detector to capture and produce 3D images of electrons, protons, and ions traveling at nearly the speed of light.

“We will learn how quarks and gluons create mass, how their interactions contribute to proton spin, and much more that will change our understanding of matter—just like the science we explore at RHIC,” Deshpande said.