- Jan 7, 2002
- 12,755
- 3
- 0
What do you get when you turn the temperature up to a trillion degrees?
Quite a heating bill.
Actually physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma ? thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang.
Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.
But a big mystery looms over the detection: the putative plasma explodes more violently than predicted.
"We expected to bring the nuclear liquid to a boil and produce a steam of quark-gluon plasma," said John Cramer from the University of Washington. "Instead, the boiler seems to be blowing up in our faces."
The explosive result, which goes by the name of the HBT puzzle, may call into question what RHIC is making in its high-speed collisions, or it might mean the theory needs retuning.
Cramer and his colleagues have another alternative explanation, too: perhaps the explosion is not as explosive as the data suggests. The scientists use 50-year old physics to reinterpret the measurements at RHIC.
"We have taken a quantum mechanics technique, called the nuclear optical model, from an old and dusty shelf and applied it to puzzling new physics results," said Gerald Miller, a coauthor also at the University of Washington. "It's really a scientific detective story."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html
Quite a heating bill.
Actually physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma ? thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang.
Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.
But a big mystery looms over the detection: the putative plasma explodes more violently than predicted.
"We expected to bring the nuclear liquid to a boil and produce a steam of quark-gluon plasma," said John Cramer from the University of Washington. "Instead, the boiler seems to be blowing up in our faces."
The explosive result, which goes by the name of the HBT puzzle, may call into question what RHIC is making in its high-speed collisions, or it might mean the theory needs retuning.
Cramer and his colleagues have another alternative explanation, too: perhaps the explosion is not as explosive as the data suggests. The scientists use 50-year old physics to reinterpret the measurements at RHIC.
"We have taken a quantum mechanics technique, called the nuclear optical model, from an old and dusty shelf and applied it to puzzling new physics results," said Gerald Miller, a coauthor also at the University of Washington. "It's really a scientific detective story."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html
Facebook
Twitter