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Physicists re-create primordial soup succeeding Big Bang
New York, June 20: Physicists say they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one-thousandth of a second after its birth.
New York, June 20: Physicists say they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one-thousandth of a second after its birth.
This matter is called quark-gluon plasma and physicists believe it is key in understanding both the dawn of the universe and the interior of atomic nuclei.
"The matter we have created has properties that have never before been observed," William Zajc of Columbia University, one of hundreds of researchers working on the project at Brookhaven national laboratory, said Wednesday.
Whether this new matter actually qualifies as the long-sought quark-gluon plasma is an issue for debate, but all of the scientists who heard the evidence agreed that what they've seen so far looks good.
"There is still work to do," said Peter Jacobs of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who expressed hesitation about the findings.
He and his colleagues have submitted three papers describing their results to the journal physical review letters.
Quark-gluon plasma offers a glimpse at both the birth of the universe 13 billion years ago and the incredibly tiny realm in side atomic nuclei today. Since its birth, the universe has gradually cooled from more than 100 trillion degrees to today's relatively frigid conditions.
As temperatures fell below about a trillion degrees, quarks and gluons went from a free state into the confines of protons and neutrons. By reversing that process, even for only an instant, physicists hope to learn how it occurred.
Bureau Report
"The matter we have created has properties that have never before been observed," William Zajc of Columbia University, one of hundreds of researchers working on the project at Brookhaven national laboratory, said Wednesday.
Whether this new matter actually qualifies as the long-sought quark-gluon plasma is an issue for debate, but all of the scientists who heard the evidence agreed that what they've seen so far looks good.
"There is still work to do," said Peter Jacobs of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who expressed hesitation about the findings.
He and his colleagues have submitted three papers describing their results to the journal physical review letters.
Quark-gluon plasma offers a glimpse at both the birth of the universe 13 billion years ago and the incredibly tiny realm in side atomic nuclei today. Since its birth, the universe has gradually cooled from more than 100 trillion degrees to today's relatively frigid conditions.
As temperatures fell below about a trillion degrees, quarks and gluons went from a free state into the confines of protons and neutrons. By reversing that process, even for only an instant, physicists hope to learn how it occurred.
Bureau Report