quark-gluon plasma

[stubeeef]

Cool, I mean HOT, well you know what I mean!

Plazlink

big quote

For a tiny fraction of a second after the "big bang" birth of the universe, all matter was in the form of this liquid, called a quark-gluon plasma, the researchers said.

"We have a new state of matter," Sam Aronson said, associate laboratory director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States.

"We think we are looking at a phenomenon ... in the universe 13 billion years ago when free quarks and gluons ... cooled down to the particles that we know today," Mr Aronson told a news conference carried by telephone from a meeting of the American Physical Society in Tampa, Florida.

The quark-gluon plasma was made in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider - a powerful atom smasher at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.

Unexpectedly, the quark gluon plasma behaved like a perfect liquid of quarks, instead of a gas, the physicists said.

For their experiment, the researchers smashed two gold ions together at extremely high speeds, very close to the speed of light.

The collision was so intense that the strong force that usually binds quarks into protons and neutrons weakened, allowing the quarks to roam freely.

Normally quarks, the most basic particles that make up matter, are bound together and cannot be measured directly.

At temperatures 10,000 times hotter than those found inside the sun and with just a few thousand particles, the nuclear physicists expected the quarks to fly around freely like a gas.

Instead, the quarks behaved like a perfect liquid, flowing together like a school of fish, without turbulence or random motion.

In contrast, a drop of water containing the same number of particles would not behave like a liquid at all, but just fly apart.

"This is fluid motion that is nearly 'perfect,'" Mr Aronson said.

"The truly stunning finding at RHIC that the new state of matter created in the collisions of gold ions is more like a liquid than a gas gives us a profound insight into the earliest moments of the universe," Raymond Orbach said, director of the Department of Energy Office of Science, which funds the collider.

The unexpected results have a link to another field of physics, called string theory.

String theory attempts to explain properties of the universe using 10 dimensions, instead of the three space and one time dimension that humans commonly perceive.

Experts said the string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark gluon plasma.

"It's very powerful, very intriguing," Miklos Gyulassy said, a theoretical nuclear physicist at Columbia University in New York.

The findings, detailed in four separate studies, will be published in the journal Nuclear Physics A.

 

[jayscheuerle]

Quark-gluon plasma. It's what's for dinner.

 

[stubeeef]

MONGO-MONGO-MONGo.... (must be chanted like saying Beetlejuice 3 times to summon him).

 

[MongoTheGeek]

MONGO-MONGO-MONGo.... (must be chanted like saying Beetlejuice 3 times to summon him).

More like "Hastur Hastur Hastur"



Not sure what to say. I thought this was discussed before (around the time the article was publish in new scientist) but a quick search of the forums didn't turn it up.

Essentially what they did was create a little black hole. Black holes are where there is so much force/mass/energy in one place that it overrides the universe's rule about two things being in the same place. Everything that gets clumped together stays clumped together because of gravity so of course it sticks like a fluid.

Theory goes black holes evaporate at a rate inversely proportional to their size. The smaller the hole the faster it goes. One that small I'm sure they had problems keeping it "fed"

 

[stubeeef]

More like "Hastur Hastur Hastur"



Not sure what to say. I thought this was discussed before (around the time the article was publish in new scientist) but a quick search of the forums didn't turn it up.

Essentially what they did was create a little black hole. Black holes are where there is so much force/mass/energy in one place that it overrides the universe's rule about two things being in the same place. Everything that gets clumped together stays clumped together because of gravity so of course it sticks like a fluid.

Theory goes black holes evaporate at a rate inversely proportional to their size. The smaller the hole the faster it goes. One that small I'm sure they had problems keeping it "fed"

Ya, that's what I was going to say.

 

[andiwm2003]

Theory goes black holes evaporate at a rate inversely proportional to their size. The smaller the hole the faster it goes. One that small I'm sure they had problems keeping it "fed"

man, i'm so glad that this theory is correct...........