On Tuesday, May 29, RIKEN Executive Director Maki Kawai and Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) Director Samuel Aronson signed an agreement to extend the RIKEN-BNL Memorandum of Understanding until 2018. The MOU was extended to further promote collaboration on spin physics research.

Since 1995, RIKEN has collaborated with BNL to construct the apparatus for polarized proton and PHENIX inside the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). In December 2001, the world's first high-energy collision of polarized protons was achieved under the collaboration.

After twice extending the collaboration agreement in 2002 and 2007, the RIKEN-BNL collaboration succeeded in achieving many results including measurement of the temperature of 4 trillion kelvin (equivalent to the temperature immediately after the Big Bang) in gold ion collisions at RHIC in 2010. These impressive achievements are a testament to the success of the spin physics collaboration agreement between RIKEN and BNL.