Physicists Find New State of Matter

[onedomino]

Early Universe was a Liquid
Quark-Gluon Blob Surprises Particle Physicists.
Mark Peplow

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050418/full/050418-5.html

The Universe consisted of a perfect liquid in its first moments, according to results from an atom-smashing experiment.

Scientists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York, have spent five years searching for the quark-gluon plasma that is thought to have filled our Universe in the first microseconds of its existence. Most of them are now convinced they have found it. But, strangely, it seems to be a liquid rather than the expected hot gas.

Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, and gluons carry the strong force that binds them together. It is thought that these particles took some moments to condense into ordinary matter after the intense heat of the Big Bang.

To recreate this soup of unbound particles, the RHIC accelerates charged gold atoms close to the speed of light before smashing them together. Previous experiments have shown that these collisions create something the size of an atomic nucleus that reaches 2 trillion degrees Celsius, about 150,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

It's as much a fluid as the water in this glass.

"This stuff was last seen in the Universe 13 billion years ago," says Sam Aronson, a director of high energy research at Brookhaven.

Now experiments have revealed that this hot blob is a liquid, which lives for just 10-23 seconds. "This was completely unexpected," says Wit Busza of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the team of researchers who reported their discovery on 18 April at the American Physical Society conference in Tampa, Florida.

Hot water

"The surprising thing is that the interaction between the quarks and gluons is much stronger than people expected," says Dmitri Kharzeev, a theoretical physicist at Brookhaven. The strength of this binding keeps the mixture liquefied despite its incredible temperature. "It's as much a fluid as the water in this glass," Kharzeev says, pointing to his drink.

The researchers worked out the liquid's structure by tracking the particles that spray out as the droplet falls apart and quarks team up to form normal matter. "It's a very complicated thing," says Busza. "But we've been amazed at how simple the results are."

The resulting liquid is almost 'perfect': it has a very low viscosity and is so uniform that it looks the same from any angle.

This may help to explain why the deepest parts of the Universe seem similar wherever astronomers look, says Kharzeev. If the primordial liquid had been as viscous as honey, the Universe could have turned out much more lumpy, he explains. "We can be certain this will change our picture of the early Universe," he says.

The researchers now hope to measure the heat capacity, viscosity and even the speed of sound in the quark liquid. But the RHIC has been hit by cuts in the recent US budget, forcing it to reduce its operating time from 30 to 12 weeks next year. Further investigations will inevitably take years to complete, says Aronson.

-

 

[GotZoom]

I thought Quark was bigger than that.

 

[dilloduck]

I guess that explains why aliens have gills.

sorry---It WAS an interesting factoid TY .

 

[5stringJeff]

Excellent artice onedomino. I can't imagine a liquid universe at 2,000,000,000,000 degrees!

 

[GotZoom]

It was interesting. Just messing with you.

It is a shame their research has been cut to only 12 weeks.

Imagine the possibilities of what they could find if they could research year round.

 

[dilloduck]

It was interesting. Just messing with you.

It is a shame their research has been cut to only 12 weeks.

Imagine the possibilities of what they could find if they could research year round.

I'm still mixed about govt moneys going into this tho. What exactly are they looking for and how will that help us ?

 

[GotZoom]

"The resulting liquid is almost 'perfect': it has a very low viscosity and is so uniform that it looks the same from any angle.

The researchers now hope to measure the heat capacity, viscosity and even the speed of sound in the quark liquid. "

Maybe some smart than I am can tell us what this will do for us.

 

[onedomino]

I'm still mixed about govt moneys going into this tho. What exactly are they looking for and how will that help us ?

This site will answer your questions, dillo: http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/. The sciences of particle physics and quantum mechanics have yielded many practical inventions, including the device you are using to read this message.

Why Does Quark Matter 'Matter'?

http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/matter.htm

The history of modern technological development can be viewed as a series of probings, with ever increasing resolution, into the microscopic structure of matter. Since the days of the early Greek philosophers, when the question of the indivisibility of matter was first examined, science has been on a continual quest to find the smallest piece — the most fundamental building block — forming the substance of the universe.

During that journey, many beautiful and exotic properties of the subatomic world have been discovered: elusive particles with wave-like properties the ultimate position of which can never be known; “particles” of light that deliver a fixed amount of energy when they impact the atoms of a material’s surface; particles in some types of electrical conductors that pair in a unique way because of intrinsic “spin” so that, below a certain temperature, all resistance goes to zero.

Knowledge of these and many other wonderful properties discovered in the last century in the process of studying the structure of matter at smaller and smaller scales has allowed modern society to use matter and energy in myriad ways too fantastic to conceive merely half a century ago.

Today, hundreds of times every day, each of us uses modern technology that relies on a basic understanding of the microscopic structure and properties of matter. For instance, the youngest school child thinks nothing of working on a personal computer, which is based upon state-of-the-art electronics. Life-threatening ailments are imaged, diagnosed, and treated without ever having to resort to surgery. And people can speak clearly to others halfway around the world using a phone barely the size of a human hand.

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is designed to extend this frontier, providing access to the most fundamental building blocks of nature known so far — quarks and gluons. By colliding the nuclei of gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light, RHIC will, for a fleeting instant, heat the matter in collision to more than a billion times the temperature of the sun. In so doing, scientists will be able to study the fundamental properties of the basic building blocks of matter, as well as learn how they behaved collectively some 15 to 20 billion years ago, when the universe was barely a split-second old.

Scientists have a theory, called quantum-chromo dynamics, about what will be revealed at RHIC. However, without performing the experiment, who knows what the truth really is?

Many of the greatest advances of the last century resulted from experiments that yielded results that were completely different from what theory had predicted. Those successful “failures” have led to a new understanding of the microscopic structure of matter and to the technology so essential to modern life.

RHIC will provide the first chance for a rigorous test of the most basic predictions of what is thought to be understood about the structure of matter at the smallest scale imagined so far. However, it is not possible to predict what RHIC will provide in terms of technology for the future. Because RHIC is pushing further out on the high-temperature frontier than ever before, any new understanding about the structure of matter arising from RHIC may not immediately or ever lead to practical applications as did experiments in the last century.

If history is any indicator, then two things are clear: First, humankind can only profit by having a deeper, more profound understanding of the ultimate structure of the matter making up the universe. And second, every time that something fundamental has been learned about the matter’s structure at a deeper level that knowledge has resulted in a benefit to humankind.

Physicists around the world are interested in RHIC collisions. The information found at RHIC can be applied in nuclear physics (the study of the atom), particle physics (the study of the atom's parts), astrophysics (the study of stars and planets), condensed matter physics (the science of solid matter) and cosmology (the study of the universe): http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/heavy_ion.htm

 

[onedomino]

University Of Nevada, Reno Professor Showcases 'Mini' Ion Accelerator

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/04/050418204131.htm

Tom Cowan's team is thinking smaller, but with big impact. Particle accelerators are a key research tool in a high energy physicist's arsenal, but they take up a lot of space -- miles and miles of it. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, smaller is better.

Tom Cowan's team is thinking smaller, but with big impact. Particle accelerators are a key research tool in a high energy physicist's arsenal, but they take up a lot of space -- miles and miles of it. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, smaller is better.

Cowan, director of the Nevada Terawatt Facility at the University, and his research partners have produced a proton beam that has 100 times higher quality than any conventional particle accelerator and fits on a tabletop.

Irradiation with accelerated carbon ions can pinpoint a tumor and destroy it without sacrificing surrounding tissue, making possible treatment for some cancers, such as those in the head region, that were previously untreatable.

Reducing the size, and thus ultimately the cost, and improving the quality of the ion beam could provide broader access to basic research as well as applications such as ion beam cancer therapy, Cowan said.

"This could result in cheaper and more readily available ion beam cancer therapies, which have been shown to be far more precise in treating cancer than conventional therapies," he added.

Using ultra high-intensity, short-pulsed lasers to irradiate thin metallic foils, Cowan and his team have generated a high-current beam of protons and ions.

"In principle, this could replace roughly 30 feet of conventional radio frequency accelerators," Cowan told attendees at the American Physical Society meeting here. The experiments were performed at the Laboratoire pour l'Utilization des Lasers Intense (LULI) laser facility at the Ecole Polytechnique near Paris, France, and at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, N.M., using its Trident laser.

Current particle accelerators, by comparison, include the Department of Energy's Fermilab accelerator in Illinois, which is four miles in circumference, while the huge CERN European Laboratory in Switzerland -- made widely popular in the Dan Brown novel, Angels & Demons -- is nearly 17 miles in circumference.

Cowan leads a team of approximately 65 at the Nevada Terawatt Facility, which houses a 2 trillion watt Z-pinch. The Terawatt team is bringing the Z-pinch together with a one-tenth-scale petawatt laser to create the only facility in the world with this capacity. The facility also boasts strong in-house theory and simulation capabilities supported by a 48-node cluster computer.

Research areas underway at the Terawatt Facility include wire array physics, laboratory studies of astrophysics, dynamic processes in material science, ultra-strongly magnetized solids and plasmas, advanced backlighters, laser plasma and laser solid interactions, laser plasma acceleration, and ultrafast x-ray sources.

The Terawatt Facility theory team is also developing simulations to support experiments that include Department of Energy-funded Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National laboratories; LULI; the Institute for Laser Engineering at Osaka University in Japan; and the Max Born Institute and the Gesellschaft fuer Schwerionenforschung in Germany.

Research funding at the facility nearly tripled since 2001 to $8.5 million. Papers published in top refereed publications such as Nature, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review and Physics of Plasmas, as well as refereed conference proceedings, has grown nearly six-fold in four years to 46 papers in 2004.

Cowan joined the Nevada's physics department in April 2003. He completed his undergraduate work at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and his graduate studies at Yale University. He spent 13 years at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and two years at General Atomics in San Diego before joining the University.

-