http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/big-bang-conditions-quark-soup-100215.html

 

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WASHINGTON By smashing gold particles together at super-fast speeds' date=' physicists have basically melted protons, creating a kind of "quark soup" of matter that is about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun and similar to conditions just after the birth of the universe.Scientists reported in 2005 that they suspected they had created this unique state of matter, but for the first time they have verified that the extreme temperatures necessary have been reached.

 

"This is the hottest matter ever created in the laboratory," Steven Vigdor, associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., said Monday at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington, D.C. "The temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons."

 

The gold particles used in the experiment were only the nuclei the positively-charged part of the atom made of protons and neutrons. Two sprays of gold nuclei were accelerated in opposite directions along a circular track in an underground "atom smasher" called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) Brookhaven.

 

Traveling along this 2.4-mile-long (3.9 km) circle, the gold nuclei were accelerated to near the speed of light. When two of these particles smashed into each other, their collisions produced such huge amounts of energy that the matter was heated up to about 7 trillion degrees Fahrenheit (4 trillion degrees Celsius).

 

These scorching conditions are enough to melt the protons and neutrons into their constituent parts namely fundamental particles called quarks and gluons.

 

This soup of quarks and gluons is thought to have filled the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang that may have created it about 13.7 billion years ago. After that point, the matter would have cooled and condensed to form the protons and neutrons that make up the matter we see today.

 

"This research offers significant insight into the fundamental structure of matter and the early universe, highlighting the merits of long-term investment in large-scale, basic research programs at our national laboratories," said Dr. William F. Brinkman, director of the DOE Office of Science. "I commend the careful approach RHIC scientists have used to gather detailed evidence for their claim of creating a truly remarkable new form of matter."

 

The soupy cauldron of fundamental particles lasted less than a billionth of a trillionth of a second. But that was enough time for physicists to measure its properties and temperature using a detector built around the collision site.

 

The temperature measurements came via photons, or bits of light, that were emitted shortly after the nuclei crashed into each other.

 

"This was an extraordinarily challenging measurement," said Barbara Jacak, a professor of physics at Stony Brook University in Stony Brook, N.Y. and spokesperson for the PHENIX collaboration, one of RHIC's four experiments.

 

Somewhat surprisingly, the strange state of matter behaves like a liquid, though earlier predictions suggested it would act more like a gas.

 

"We know that this is a liquid, but we need to find out why it's a liquid, and what role did its free-flowing nature play in the early universe?" Jacak said.

 

Physicists may have a chance to study an even hotter state of matter once the world's largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, starts operating at full speed. Collisions in that machine could produce temperatures two or three times hotter than the recent experiment, Jacak said.

 

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Its amazing what scientist do, it seems everyday something new and crazy is achieved.

Hmm... The possibilities... If you melt stuff down into its fundamental properties and then shape it back into what you want, then... Alchemy may finally be possible! :razz:

 

lol.

 

Hmm... it's kind of interesting, but having it last for such an infinitesimally small amount of time doesn't seem like much of an accomplishment to me. I suppose it is quite the leap forward though.

Interesting. I'm curious to see what happens once the LHC becomes fully operational.

That's pretty awesome.

makes you wonder if they needed to repair their accelerator after that collision and heat output :mellow:

makes you wonder if they needed to repair their accelerator after that collision and heat output :mellow:

Even with such ridiculously high temperatures, the energy involved in the collision is relatively low. In one of their videos they said such a collision had an energy of about 6 µJ (around the same as 5 collisions between flying mosquitoes).

 

I've actually heard that American physicists are trying to do as many experiments as possible before the LHC gets fully operational and, well, makes all US particle accelerators obsolete.

Alchemy may finally be possible! :razz:

 

It already is, and it has been done before. It just costs more when you expend the energy than the profit you can make from it.

Alchemy may finally be possible! :razz:

 

It already is, and it has been done before. It just costs more when you expend the energy than the profit you can make from it.

Can't we just draw an array and then clap our hands together?

Well, my mind's officially been blown.

 

What's a quark made of, I wonder...

Well, my mind's officially been blown.

 

What's a quark made of, I wonder...

 

 

ahhh, the beauties of string theory, or spring theory.

 

Boith our physics teacher and TA went to CERN when the world speed record was broken, so they pretty much were all over us with facts etc. 99,99993% of the speed of light is pretty fast. Cern looked cool in pictures and video, but nothing like it does in angels and demons :D

 

 

 

edit: wait, the factual claim of the washingtonians is wrong. Cern is faster, and higher temperature. They are the only group that can attain speeds high enough to even attempt finding the Higgs particle for instance. the claim in the article is directly wrong -.-'

Well, my mind's officially been blown.

 

What's a quark made of, I wonder...

 

 

ahhh, the beauties of string theory, or spring theory.

 

Boith our physics teacher and TA went to CERN when the world speed record was broken, so they pretty much were all over us with facts etc. 99,99993% of the speed of light is pretty fast. Cern looked cool in pictures and video, but nothing like it does in angels and demons :D

 

 

 

edit: wait, the factual claim of the washingtonians is wrong. Cern is faster, and higher temperature. They are the only group that can attain speeds high enough to even attempt finding the Higgs particle for instance. the claim in the article is directly wrong -.-'

String theory is so hard to understand. Even just just the basics make me mind explode...

I love to hear about this. I wonder what is going to be discovered when the LHC is put to the test.

M-theory is even freakier than just general string theory. It's about our universe being inside a giant bubble, which is inside a higher plane that contains multiple bubbles (universes). When the bubbles/membranes collide, a big bang is triggered, and the membranes that touch each other become parallel universes. :unsure:

makes you wonder if they needed to repair their accelerator after that collision and heat output :mellow:

Even with such ridiculously high temperatures, the energy involved in the collision is relatively low. In one of their videos they said such a collision had an energy of about 6 µJ (around the same as 5 collisions between flying mosquitoes).

 

Heat is energy so my little knowledge base of science seems to tell me that the more heat the more energy so with high heat you get loads of energy.

But again, I've always been terrible at science.

makes you wonder if they needed to repair their accelerator after that collision and heat output :mellow:

Even with such ridiculously high temperatures, the energy involved in the collision is relatively low. In one of their videos they said such a collision had an energy of about 6 µJ (around the same as 5 collisions between flying mosquitoes).

 

Heat is energy so my little knowledge base of science seems to tell me that the more heat the more energy so with high heat you get loads of energy.

But again, I've always been terrible at science.

 

I think he just meant that the particles were moving extremely fast in the accelerator (thus, high heat), but there weren't enough particles to cause any damage.

makes you wonder if they needed to repair their accelerator after that collision and heat output :mellow:

Even with such ridiculously high temperatures, the energy involved in the collision is relatively low. In one of their videos they said such a collision had an energy of about 6 µJ (around the same as 5 collisions between flying mosquitoes).

 

Heat is energy so my little knowledge base of science seems to tell me that the more heat the more energy so with high heat you get loads of energy.

But again, I've always been terrible at science.

The thing is, heat isn't the same as temperature. To put it simply, a cup of hot water and a large pool filled with hot water may have the same temperature, but the pool has much more energy stored as heat. I hope that makes sense.

makes sense to me. I love particle accelerators. It just always tends to baffle me that these suckers can split atoms and nothing at all happens to the gear.. like you don't expect a-bomb destruction, but over time.. something? meh..

That's really awesome ;o Reminds me of Angels & Demons tbh :XD: