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)."

Comments

Re:Applications?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Those damn humans!

[mikeophile]

This is from a report Brookhaven made to define the possible dangers of the RHIC. Oddly, the site seems to be down now. Black holes and stable negatively charged strangelets, while cool ways to snuff the world, don't hold a candle to this one. the report

This is an exotic possibility of which the report states that "Physicists have grown quite accustomed to the idea that empty space  what we ordinarily call 'vacuum'  is in reality a highly structured medium, that can exist in various states or phases, roughly analogous to the liquid or solid phases of water. . . . Although certainly nothing in our existing knowledge of the laws of Nature demands it, several physicists have speculated on the possibility that our contemporary 'vacuum' is only metastable, and that a sufficiently violent disturbance might trigger its decay into something quite different. A transition of this kind would propagate outward from its source throughout the universe at the speed of light, and would be catastrophic."

Not really

[f97tosc]

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