Creating New Matter: Primordial Soup @ CERN

hobgadling writes "According to ABC News, physicists at CERN in Geneva have recreated a "quark-gluon plasma", also known as the primordial soup, the state of the universe right after the big bang. The article here says that more experiments will have to be done at Brookhaven National Labs to prove this. " Brookhaven will be starting research in this area this summer - with much more powerful instrumentation.

Comments

Official Page

[sash]

Lots of TV operators and media people around, here at CERN today.

Please go and check the official web pages: A New State of Matter

Big bang?

[Malc]

I thought I'd heard that the latest thinking of great minds (such as Stephen Hawking's) was that the big bang theory was flawed, and that it probably didn't happen. True, or has somebody been pulling my leg?

Re:Big bang?

[jd]

Close, but not quite. Steven Hawking's new theory is that there is no meaningful time 0, and therefore no singularity. Rather, space/time increasingly curve, when going back in time - similar to a y=x^(2n) function, where n is any integer number.

That way, the further you go back in time, the smaller the Universe gets, but it never reaches a single point. As t approaches 0, the gradient approaches 0.

The practical upshot is that, whilst the theory still says there was a Big Bang, there is no definable -point- for time 0.

Re:Another reason the SSC shouldn't have died.

[sash]

If you are interested in neutrinos, there's quite a lot going on. Check:
Fermilab's MINOS;
CERN's NGS;
more in general, a page on Neutrino oscillation

Primordial soup, et al.

[jd]

Actually, it's not primordial soup. Unless Fred Hoyle knew something the rest of the world didn't, when he wrote "The Black Cloud".

But, on the off-chance it -is- soup, I'll have a cup, with some cheese and a slice of bread, please.

Quark soup is interesting, as it allows the formation of some -really- exotic matter. Most matter in this Universe consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. However, protons and neutrons are comprised of triplets of quarks.

This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table. (You could form elements that had radically different natures. There'd be no neutrons, for example, so no isotopes. A nucleus would be kept stable with a mix of positively and negatively-charged particles, with the net charge being something really bizare.)

Re:Primordial soup, et al.

[Greg Merchan]

Just to pick nits...

There are plenty of things made of paired quarks, they just don't last for long. (No relativity jokes please...oops!). For example: down and anti-up combine to form the pi-negative meson.

(If my naming is archane, I apologize. This is not my forte. I'm stuck in Maxwellian times. ;-)

Also, there's more than one periodic table. The one to which is referred in jd's post is the one of elements. There's also the one of nuclides. Changes in the nucleic structure probably wouldn't change much on the elemental level, at least no much more than isotopic nuclei do. What's interesting is what you can do besides atomic chemistry. Nuclear stability is hardly dependent on electric charge, it's not strong enough. ;-)

(Hmm... Some might argue than protons and neutrons are not comprised of triplets of quarks, but that they are particular triplets; proton = uud, neutron = udd.)

Learn to pick nits! And why! Visit The Underground Grammarian. (Check out the license too!)

Re:Primordial soup, et al.

[Pyro P]

This is where it gets interesting. Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three.
The question is, will Campbells be selling cans of condensed quark soup now? I'd just love some Chunky Strange right about now...

more about RHIC

[Shin Dig]

I got to see a presentation by one of the lead physicists working on RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Colider) 3 or 4 years ago. Follows is as much as I can remember about it and quark gluon plasma (disclaimer: I have been out of the physics community for 2 years now, so some of my quantum may be rusty)

In order to create quark gluon plasma you need a lot of energy. Most colliders work on the principle of getting light ions (like stripped helium atoms) and making them go really fast. RHIC decided that what would be more useful is to take really heavy ions (E = mc^2) and collide them. The will be using stripped gold atoms. (When I say stripped, I mean they got every electron off of them, all 79 of them) The have the two streams going in oppisite directions till they get up to speed, then ram them into each other.

I'm going to butcher anything else I say about this, so go check out this cern page for more info on quark gluon plasma. It has a really cool animation on their main page showing the collision.

quark-gluon plasma

[Hard_Code]

Quark-Gluon Plasma (as seen on TV)

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Re:Imaginary time and boundary conditions

[kaphka]

Doesn't GR basically say that the universe has a finite "radius" so-to-speak and that you'll end up back where you started if you could travel long enough. Looks like Hawking's carried that over into the time-dimension as well?

While it may be aesthetically pleasing to think of it that way, I don't think the two properties are related. I actually thought that Hawking's idea had more to do with quantum mechanics than relativity, in that increasing uncertainty in the size of the universe would prevent it from ever actually being 0. I might be wrong, though. IANA cosomologist. However...

Of course didn't GR also say that in order to end up back where you started it would take an infinite amount of time? (All mathematically speaking of course)

That is definitely not right. Spatially, the universe is entirely finite (at least, that's the consensus). Circumnavigating it would take a really long time, longer than the current age of the universe, but it can and will happen (once the universe has been around long enough for the light of the Big Bang to travel from one end to the other.)

Anyway, hasn't Hawking pretty much abandoned the "bounce" idea? I seem to remember him not treating it very seriously in recent editions of A Brief History of Time.

Re:Dense?

[Tau Zero]

can anybody estimate critical mass for the black hole to eat the Earth rather then evaporate.

I can't recall the actual constant, but the Hawking radiation from a BH is proportional to the inverse fourth power of the mass, implying that the lifespan is proportional to the mass cubed. Even looking at the mass of a lead or gold atom, it's obvious that you could not form a BH from them in the first place; the uncertainty of the position of the nuclei is many times the Schwartzchild radius of a BH of their combined mass. (Schwartzchild radius = 2MG/c^2. G, the gravitational constant, is a very small number, c^2 is a pretty big number, and M for 2 gold atoms is less than 10^-21 grams.)
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Primordial disappearing ink

[Tau Zero]

Condense quark soup, and you can get another stable construct, made of -TWO- quarks, rather than three. Such constructs would be meta-stable, but kept under the right conditions could give you an entirely different periodic table.

Condense quark soup, or mix protons and anti-protons, and you do indeed get constructs made of two quarks. They are called mesons, and they are quite unstable. You will not do any chemistry with them because they become electrons, positrons and neutrinos in a rather small number of microseconds.
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