Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) tagged posts

Tracking particle spins reveals that the quark-gluon plasma created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is more swirly than the cores of super-cell tornadoes, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, or any other fluid! Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Swirling soup of matter’s fundamental building blocks spins 10 billion trillion times faster than the most powerful tornado, setting new record for ‘vorticity’. Particle collisions recreating the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that filled the early universe reveal that droplets of this primordial soup swirl far faster than any other fluid...

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...

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...