primordial soup tagged posts

The nuclear phase diagram: RHIC sits in the energy “sweet spot” for exploring the transition between ordinary matter made of hadrons and the early universe matter known as quark-gluon plasma. Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

An in-depth look at the origins of matter and the environmental conditions that helped shape the universe today. Our understanding is shaped by re-creating events that constituted the Big Bang and by studying the primordial soup of fundamental particles of the very early universe. One of the best science tools for this is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

RHIC, a particle collider, is the first machine capable of mashing together heavy ions, which are atoms that h...

The figure shows how a small, elongated drop of quark-gluon plasma is formed when two atomic nuclei hit each other a bit off center. The angular distribution of the emitted particles makes it possible to determine the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, including the viscosity. Credit: State University of New York

Researchers collided lead atoms with extremely high energy in the 27 km long particle accelerator. The primordial soup is a quark-gluon plasma and researchers have measured its liquid properties with great accuracy at the LHC’s top energy. A few billionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was made up extremely hot and dense primordial soup of quarks and gluons. By colliding lead nuclei at a record-high 5...

Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory Initial hot spots created by collisions of one, two, and three-particle ions with much larger gold ions (top row). Expected patterns if the collisions are creating tiny hot spots of the primordial soup, or quark-gluon plasma.

Surprisingly, smaller particles colliding with large nuclei appear to produce tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Recent results show that the tiny droplets behave like a liquid not the expected gas. The results support the case that these small particles produce tiny drops of the primordial soup.

Smashing large atomic nuclei, containing protons and neutrons, together at close to the speed of light re-creates the conditions of the very early universe...