The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island is working on an experiment that has recreated the quark-gluon plasma. By this, the scientists have briefly bringing back to life a state of matter rare in the universe today. It might not even exist at all anymore since this was the state of matter during the Big Bang.
For this special state of matter to be recreated the researchers had to smash three helium-3 atoms into an ionized gold atom, creating energy. An international team at the LHC and researchers at the University of Kansas are working together to produce quark-gluon plasma, a particular state of matter believed to have existed right at the birth of the universe. They were able to do that with fewer particles than previously thought possible.
Inside the super collider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector, the special state of matter was discovered by colliding protons with lead nuclei at high energy. The resulting plasma has been dubbed by the physicists the "littlest liquid."
A senior scientists associated with the CMS detector, Quan Wang, declared that the unexpected discovery sheds new light on high-energy physics. According to him, it had been thought before the CMS experimental results that the medium created in a proton on lead collisions would be too small to produce a quark-gluon plasma. Wang is a KU post-doctoral researcher working with the team at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. The scientist performed a key analysis and published recently a paper about the experiment in APS Physics.
The KU researcher explained that the quark-gluon plasma consists in a very hot and dense state of matter of unbound quarks and gluons. This particular state of matter is not contained within individual nucleons.
Wang added that previously these collisions were being studied as a reference for collisions of two lead nuclei in order to better understand the non-quark-gluon-plasma aspects of the collisions. According to his analysis presented in the published paper, he found contrary to expectations, that "a quark-gluon plasma can be created in very asymmetric proton on lead collisions."
While high-energy particle physics often focuses just on the aspect of detection of subatomic particles like the recently discovered Higgs Boson, the new research on quark-gluon-plasma rather examines the behavior of a volume of such particles. Wang explained that such experiments might help scientists to gain a better understanding of the cosmic conditions in the instant following the Big Bang.
