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Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma
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)."
I know it's provincial, but there's just something scary about the thought of harnessing something, and I quote, "1,000,000,000,000 degrees" in temperature on earth...
For a while as an undergrad I pursued a Physics major, but lost interest as it seemed that pursuits like this are basically the modern-day version of cavemen smashing rocks together and ogling over the results.
What, pray tell, could be the useful results of this research? I don't mean to be critical - I believe that there is far too little basic research going on these days. But where, ultimately, does this research lead?
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Offhand-
This sort of physics is relevant to nanotechnology (and the subsequent issues of high-volume micromanufacture, etc.), as well as possibly energy resources (i.e. ZPF if that bears out, etc.).
"Stumble before you crawl"
It's likely we will never see the benifits of the research we do now. That's just how it seems to go. But in the 23rd century, it may be used to do just about anything........... ;)
(Tachyons here we come...)
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
i did my ph.d. in particle physics and this question gets asked many, many times. the typical answer from physicists would pull up something like a tv as an example - the electron tube developed by physicists is the basis for CRT... i don't, however, buy this notion. the easiest answer would be to say, all this is (almost) useless from practical point of view. it's purely for knowledge. anything practical that might come of fundamental research is a lucky by-product. to some people, knowledge is everything. to others, not so. while it may seem a bit unfair that the tax money is spent so "those who seek knowledge for the sake of it" can (it's more like a hobby to them...), i personally think it's for a novel cause.
âThe scientists are not yet ready to claim the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma, however. That must await corroborating experiments, now under way at RHICâ
The Large Hadron Collider will hopefully be powerful enough to extend the Standard Model and get direct evidence of the Higgs boson as well.
Esteem isn't a zero sum game
but they will never reach their goal.
The theory behind quark gluon plasma has one serious flaw: it ignores the effects resulting from the existence of gravitions. Due to the weakness and long range of gravitation we hvae that the wave functions of gravitions are spread over extremely large areas. That's why it's so hard to prove their existence.
However, they have effects on the quark-gluon plasma. Their wave function couples the state of the plasma with the observer. Thus it collapses instandly and one never witness this state of matter. Note that this can't happen with the Bose-Einstein condensate, because this effect takes place on a more macroscopic level, gravitons are too weak to have any effects here.
Funnily enough you could use the quark-gluon plasma to create energy, even though it doesn't really exist. With such a plasma you can create rapid (really rapid like nanoseconds) proton decay. So you could use this basically as some advanced particle bomb (effects similar to a neutron bomb).
I wonder if this is the reason why some HEP are sponsored the DARPA.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Because it is only a few atoms that have this high temperature. 10 atoms that are 10^12 degrees hotter than the environment can heat up the 10^13 surrounding atoms by one degree. That is, it is enough energy to heat up one nanogram of material one degree. I would not sleep over it.
This is of course a very rough calculation, but the point is that we are not so much dealing with enormous energies as with moderate energies concentrated to extremely small matter. They are not going to blow something big up.
Tor
GPS and Relativity? The two are unrelated as far as I know. Although satelite navigation relies on time beacons, relativistic effects due to the velocity of the satelites, or the gravitational field differences, should be insignificant and irrelevant. Please enlighten me.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
yet another random mixing of scientific terms trying to pose as knowledgeable opinion.
1. the 'spread over extremely large areas' statement is nonsense. nothing about weak and long-range implies long wavelength. actually, the 'coupling' would be done through virtual (read - off mass shell) particles anyway so there's no energy restriction other than overall conservation - you get loop small corrections with all energies.
2. 'collapses instandly'(sic)?!? as in 'it suddenly couples'? looks like you're saying 'i can't suddenly observe qg plasma 'cause i didn't see what generated it'. either you have no idea what you're takling about or you really think qg plasma comes out of nowhere (same thing). besides, even if you did suddenly 'couple' (read interact) with it out of nowhere, you'd collapse it to what? normally adding up an interaction might break down some symmetry of the system and make it end up in a different ground state, but there's no reasonable base to say it won't still be a qg plasma. in other words, you're saying that if i ever get to see you (i.e. 'couple' to you via photons) you'll be instantly collapsed to
i'm not sure that tachyons are real. some of the string-theories predict that there is no such particle.
Meme of the day: I browse "Disable Sigs: Checked". So should you.
All elements of mass greater than Iron are either a) Big Bang remmnants, b) created by mad scientists with nuclear acclearators. Fusion in stars stops at Iron.
No. You're correct that, because of the curve of nuclear binding energy, you can't produce anything more massive than iron through fusion. But that doesn't mean heavier elements than iron come from the Big Bang. In fact, atoms heavier than carbon cannot be produced through Big Bang nucleosynthesis; H through C is all that's around when the first generation of stars form. Elements heavier than iron are produced in high-energy nuclear reactions that occur during supernovae. This is standard contemporary astrophysics, from any current textbook.
For an overview of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, see e.g. The Early Universe by Kolb and Turner, or Cosmological Physics by John Peacock. Pitched at a lower level, try Joe Silk's The Big Bang . For more general descriptions of nucleosynthesis in stars and supernovae, see e.g. Harwit's Astrophysical Concepts or Bowers and Deeming's Astrophysics, Vol. I: Stars .
Yes but lasers don't require megawatthours of electricity to generate. This sort of thing absolutely requires super high energies...
Therefore there will probably never be a commercial application to quark gluon plasma generation.
It often isn't the actual scientific experiment that is important, it's the knowledge that is gained through that experiment. For example, and this is slightly related to this experiment, in the 30s Stern and Gerlach sent a beam of hydrogen atoms through an inhomogeneous magnetic field and detected the nuclear magnetic moment. Later on Rabi sent a beam of LiCl molecules through oscillating magnetic fields to test if there was a magnetic resonance effect happening at a certain frequency.
Now neither of these experiments are used in applications today, but what they did do is establish the foundations of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, which today is used every day in MRI machines around the world. And while none of which use high energy beams in their operation, they wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the use of "non-applicable" experiments.
hehehe, we physics students have a nice time thinking about band names from physics jargon. OUr favourite is still "The Naked Singularity."
:)
Btw, the naked singularity is a concept from general relativity : it is the point in spacetime where Einstein's equation blows up and makes no sense. All blackholes, mathematically, have singularities in the middle, but they are "hidden" behind the event horizon, so a guy who fall into the blackhole may see the singularity, but will never get out to tell his friends outside the black hole. A naked singularity is one that is not "hidden" by an event horizion.
There is a conjecture, called Cosmic Censorship that says that naked singularities do not exist in nature. It is not proven. ALso, Cosmic Censorship is a great name for a band too
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Nevertheless, someone had to be able to do the calculation for just what the adjusted second should be in the first place--this requires special and general relativity.
Further, there is a small discrepancy introduced due to relativity for observers not at sea level, or travelling at significant speeds. Presumably, a knowledge of SR and GR would be handy to account for these effects.
Having said that, we could indeed use GPS with no knowledge whatsoever of relativity. We would notice pretty quickly that atomic clocks aboard satellites seemed to drift, and we could come up with a completely empirical system to compensate. (Of course, this would lead to someone developing a theory of relativity...scientists abhor this sort of unsolved problem.)
~Idarubicin
If we multiply 1.0e-(google) chance that life could evolve in such a manor by infinity, the answer is infinity. Well, in that case if there is a 1.0e-(google) to the (google)th power percent that God exists, then using the same equation you get the same result. Or again, maybe mathematical truth is relative to the person calculating it....
Your reasoning is flawed. It only makes sense for rate-based processes. As in: the probability of some thing happening in some time t is some small, but finite, number, but the probability of that thing happening goes to unity as time goes to infinity.
So, I don't think you meant to argue that the existence of God is due to a process which occurs at some rate (which is what you did). That would mean God is made at some rate by a random process, like a human being is made at some rate by a random process. I think it's an interesting and novel concept, but I doubt you agree.
What you likely meant to say is that you think there is some probability of God existing. However, that probability doesn't become more likely over time (even infinite time), as it's not a rate. It always the same.
And furthermore, there's nothing to suggest the probability is larger than zero, unlike evolution, which everyone, even creationists, conceed has a probability higher than zero as it is a physical possibility. And as you conveniently pointed out, given enough time, it'll happen. But God's existence still has the same probability, so it seems to me that you've ended up making a decent argument that evolution is more likely... Oops. I love when creationists try to use science against science. It's so cute. Now tell us how evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics! Pretty please?
To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star.
I don't have a lot other than my (very faulty) memory to back this up, but I seem to remember a Scientific American article that most of our heavy elements were formed in the shock waves of supernovas of the first round of stars. Not only that, but the progress of the supernova shock wave creates large clumps of specific types of elements.
But most of us was not inside a star at one type, hydrogen possibly excepted. Most of us was most likely formed in a shock wave.
But your point still stands: you feel immensely richer for thinking you know what you do. [Sorry for that small withdrawal from your bank account, but the interest that will accrue from your *knew* imagined knowledge will accrue at a much faster rate.]
All joking aside, we don't *know* anything, but we have our theories, and those theories do help us feel at home within our universe [much like my fish in his tank feels very uneasy when I drop a ping pong ball in the water, but later feels at home with it], and that makes us more comfortable.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap!
You're being rather generous there.
I have a degree in Physics, and the amount of utter tripe regurgitated here whenever there's a science-related article is astounding and frankly upsetting. I'm not just talking about people getting subtle matters of cutting-edge stuff wrong - I mean fundamental misconceptions on the sort of stuff I learnt at school, let alone college or university.
Mind you, the same happens with programming-related stories. I've been a professional programmer for a little over four years, and was an amateur for a lot longer before that. The signal to noise ratio is much better than in science stories, but some of the misconceptions are still shocking.
It's got to the point that I barely do much more than skim the front page most days. A shame, really, as I've been here for quite a while, as my uid should tell you.
It's official. Most of you are morons.