By colliding protons and neutrons with gold nuclei as part of the PHENIX project at the Relativistic Collider of Heavy Ions (RHIC, USA), physicists managed to get drops of ultra-hot matter, called quark-gluon plasma, which filled the entire Universe for the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, at a time when it was still too hot for the particles to come together and form atoms.
Our experimental result brought us closer to answering the question of what the smallest amount of substance could exist in the early Universe.
-Jamie Nagle, lead author of a study at the University of Colorado (USA)
Scientists recreate and study hot drops consisting of quarks and gluons – the building blocks of protons and neutrons – in order to uncover the secret of the fundamental force that holds these particles together in visible matter.
For the first time the study of such a substance at RHIC began in 2000. Then physicists pushed the heavy nuclei of the atoms of gold, creating a temperature of trillions of degrees Celsius. A few years later, another group of researchers reported that, apparently, they created a quark-gluon plasma not by the collision of atoms, but during the collision of only two protons. This was surprising because most theories suggested that single protons could not release enough energy to produce something that could flow like a liquid.
Jamie Nagle and his colleagues have developed a way to test these results: if such tiny droplets behave like a liquid, then they must retain their shape.
Imagine that you have two drops that expand in a vacuum. If they are close to each other, then, growing, drops collide, drawing a certain shape. In other words, if you throw two stones into a pond, the ripples from them will intersect, forming a pattern resembling an ellipse. The same thing can happen if you hit a proton-neutron pair, called a deuteron, or a proton-proton-neutron trio, also known as a helium-3 atom, which should expand into something like a triangle.
-Jamie Nagle
This is exactly what the PHENIX experiment found: the collisions of deuterons with oppositely moving nuclei of gold almost at the speed of light formed droplets in the shape of an ellipse, helium-3 atoms created triangles, and one proton a circle. The result, according to scientists, is fully consistent with the prediction of theoretical models and confirms that tiny projectiles did create an ideal liquid quark-gluon plasma.
The researchers note that the data will help physicists to better understand how the original primary soup of quarks and gluons, filling the universe, cooled and created the first atoms.
Tiny drops of the early universe substance was recreated
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