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Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma

Posted by timothy on from the no-cataclysm-yet dept.

Martin writes "A series of presentations and a press conference was held today at Brookhaven National Laboratory about new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The latest run was finished only a few weeks ago. The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter. The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL and in Japan and France, with the biggest cluster of about 1100 dual-CPU nodes located at the RHIC Computing Facility. It's nice to see that results are out so soon after the data were taken. There were previous stories about RHIC on /., here(1), here(2) and here(3)."

3 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Recent events by mao+che+minh · · Score: 5, Informative
    Here is a cool slideshow about the subject from 2000, when the theory was "complete speculation". And here is an article from Sciecne Watch that was written in 2001, when it was considered "somehwat speculative". There wasn't much news about it in 2002. And now, we have this story in 2003.

    Pretty cool.

  2. Coolest name for matter ever! by foo+fighter · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

    On a slightly more serious note...

    The article links to a helpful physics primer if you, like me, need a little help understanding subatomic physics. (I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)

    A little googling turned up this awesome page on subatomic particles called The Particle Adventure. This is the most accessible physics lesson I've ever received. Awesome.

    This is the most fun I've ever had with subatomic physics: Quark Dance!

    --
    obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
  3. Re:Those damn humans! by confused+one · · Score: 4, Informative
    You know, the reason the link was dead was because this was FUD generated by a few physicist claiming that RHIC could lead to the end of the world....

    It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime. i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.

    of course, I'm paraphrasing a little...