Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) is an Department of Energy, Office of Science site that conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies. Located on a 5,300-acre site on Long Island, New York, BNL also builds and operates major facilities available to university, industrial, and government scientists. Chief among these is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which drives two intersecting beams of gold ions head-on in a subatomic collision to study what the universe may have looked like a few moments after its creation.