Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Rick, the only large particle collider in the U.S., collided its last particles last week.

Rick is the relativistic heavy ion collider based at Brookhaven National Lab.

It was the second most powerful accelerator operating on the planet,

second only to the LHC at CERN. It started colliding in 2000, and scientists have used it to study

the tiniest particles, which gives us insight into some of the universe's biggest mysteries.

Dr. Jean Van Buren, a nuclear physicist at Brookhaven, is a researcher

on a Rick detector called Star. Hi, Gene. Hi there. These last collisions, I mean, were they a

celebration or awake? Oh, I think it's absolutely a celebration. There has been a fantastic

lifetime for this device, this facility.

So there's a lot to celebrate for what it's done and achieved.

You've been working on this project for decades.

What was it like to see them pull the plug?

And did they actually pull a plug?

I think they made it a bit of a like a Staples Easy button moment where they had a very important person, press a button, but behind the scenes, there's someone else who's actually really turning off the machine at the exactly the same time.

Was it emotional for you?

I think for me it was, it's, it's emotional in terms of the people. You know, these are people we've been working with for a long, long time. And, you know, it's it's emotional in terms of the people uh you know these are people we've been working with

for a long long time and um you you know it's uh relationships and time spent together doing

things for 25 plus years and um that's that's kind of the sad part as far as the science goes

there's nothing sad there there's a lot of positives for the results that we As far as the science goes, there's nothing sad there. There's a lot of positives

for the results that we've gotten and the data that we have stored and ready to analyze in the

coming years. Well, I want to get into it. Let's go back in time first. I mean, what was Rick

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