Washington, June 13: Researchers at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York, claim that they have recreated the primordial soup, called quark-gluon plasma, which was responsible for the creation of the universe.
The theory of creation was that quarks and electrons, which were the basic building blocks of matter, floated freely in an incredibly hot, dense soup. As the universe grew and cooled, the quarks bound together into the protons and neutrons that abound today.

The researchers performed an experiment where their heavyweight equipment was made to fire gold ions at each other. It was observed that this created ten times the energy needed to make the quark-gluon plasma.


During the last run in 2001, all RHIC`s detectors saw a peculiar effect called jet quenching. Normally, when two ions collide they scatter two jets of particles in opposite directions. But in the gold-gold experiment, sometimes only one jet was picked up by the detectors. Theorists wondered if the missing jets could be to do with the high energy of the gold nuclei, rather than any new kind of matter. To prove this, the teams ran the experiment again, this time colliding gold ions with smaller deuterium ions.

Although the energy of the gold ions was the same as before, the overall energy wasn`t high enough to make quark-gluon plasma. This suggested that jet quenching must have been due to quark-gluon plasma, not the gold ions themselves. This made the teams confident that their gold-gold collisions did create quark-gluon plasma for the first time.

The researchers plan more experiments to be absolutely certain of their finding. They also plan to carry out collisions at lower energies in the hope of seeing the transition from ordinary matter into quark-gluon plasma. Bureau Report