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 have had their outer cloud of electrons removed. Ion beams start at opposite ends and travel toward one another at nearly the speed of light and this high-speed collision melts the protons and neutrons of the ions, freeing the quarks and other particles to disperse in an explosion like the Big Bang.
As the first matter began to emerge from the Big Bang, it went through a number of phases producing a hot soup of quarks and gluons. Though the whole process occurred within fractions of a second, there were still phases of matter within that process not understand. RHIC was initially the only machine in the world capable of re-creating the environmental conditions and temperature in which matter can rapidly change forms, just like in the microseconds following the Big Bang.
Inside RHIC, ordinary matter tends to melt into its fundamental constituents, with temperatures >100,000X hotter than the center of the sun. This reaction allows scientists to understand the nature of matter and how we all came to be.
In addition to RHIC, the Office of Science supports research on the environmental conditions of the Big Bang at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland. LHC permits study of these phenomena under somewhat different temperature conditions from those at RHIC, bringing athis matter back to its primordial constituencies. Basically, LHC can turn French onion soup from hot to scalding. By using colliders, scientists are able to break apart particles of matter that were once confined together. This explosive reaction, which separates matter into its primordial elements, is the best way for us to understand the properties of matter.
The findings at RHIC and LHC have taught us a lot about what we are made of and where we came from. And though we now know more about the particles of matter that make up our universe, as well as the many different types of matter created by our universe, I look forward to learning “what matters” next. http://science.energy.gov/news/featured-articles/2016/03-01-16/
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