The spotlight caught Todd Satogata. The camera zoomed in. “Did your particle beam shoot down a UFO?” the TV host asked. The accelerator physicist at RHIC, Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, smiled. Of course not.
Look at the periodic table of elements, and youd be hard pressed to find an element that is not used in physics. But what are the most important elements for building accelerators, detecting particles, and solving the mysteries of the universe?