RHIC gets ready to smash gold ions for Run 23

The start of this year's physics run at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) also marks the start of a new era. For the first time since RHIC began operating at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in 2000, a brand new detector will track what happens when the nuclei of gold atoms smash into one another at nearly the speed of light. That new detector, sPHENIX, has been a decade in the making. It has a host of components for making precision measurements never possible before at RHIC.