Slashdot Mirror
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)."
..the only thing worth doing is finding a nice fountain and running naked through the spray...
Go get some sun, you homo erotica loving freaks!
UPTON, NY â" The latest results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), the worldâ(TM)s most powerful facility for nuclear physics research, strengthen scientistsâ(TM) confidence that RHIC collisions of gold ions have created unusual conditions and that they are on the right path to discover a form of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, believed to have existed in the first microseconds after the birth of the universe. The results will be presented at a special colloquium at the U.S. Department of Energyâ(TM)s Brookhaven National Laboratory on June 18 at 11 a.m., to coincide with the submission of scientific papers on the results to Physical Review Letters by three of RHICâ(TM)s international collaborations.
The scientists are not yet ready to claim the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma, however. That must await corroborating experiments, now under way at RHIC, that seek other signatures of quark-gluon plasma and explore alternative ideas for the kind of matter produced in these violent collisions.
âoeThis is a very exciting result that clearly indicates we are on the right track to an important scientific discovery,â said Thomas Kirk, Brookhavenâ(TM)s Associate Laboratory Director for High Energy and Nuclear Physics. âoeBut the case for having created quark-gluon plasma is not yet closed. We have four experiments looking for a number of different âsignaturesâ(TM) of this elusive form of extremely hot, dense nuclear matter.â
âoeThese results from RHIC are profoundly important,â said Raymond L. Orbach, Director of the Department of Energyâ(TM)s Office of Science, the primary funding agency for research at RHIC. âoeThey go to a fundamental question in science: how did the universe look at the beginning of time? People have always been fascinated by the question of how our world began. And every time something fundamental is learned, society eventually benefits, either directly from that knowledge or from the technology developed to obtain it.â
The Results
The latest RHIC findings come from experiments conducted from January through March of 2003, in which a beam of heavy gold nuclei collides head-on with a beam of deuterons (much smaller and lighter nuclei, each consisting of one proton plus one neutron). These deuteron-gold experiments, along with other experiments using two colliding beams of protons, serve as a basis for comparison with collisions of two gold beams at RHIC.
The gold-gold collisions, which bring nearly 400 protons and neutrons into collision at once, are designed to recreate, for a fleeting instant in the laboratory, the extremely hot, dense conditions of the early universe. When two gold nuclei collide head-on, the temperatures reached are so extreme (more than 300 million times the surface temperature of the sun) that the individual protons and neutrons inside the merged gold nuclei are expected to melt, releasing the quarks and gluons normally confined within them to form a tiny sample of particle âoesoupâ called quark-gluon plasma. In contrast, the small deuteron passes through the large gold nucleus like a bullet, without heating or compressing it very much. The gold nucleus remains in its usual state, composed of distinct protons and neutrons.
In either type of collision, a pair of energetic quarks can be knocked loose from within a proton or neutron. Each of these loose quarks will produce a âoejetâ of ordinary particles, and the two jets will emerge back-to-back from the collision region. Scientists can use these jets to probe your anus.
In the deuteron-gold experiments conducted this spring, back-to-back jets were seen to emerge, but in head-on collisions from the earlier gold-gold experiments, one of the two jets was missing. In addition, fewer highly energetic individual particles are observed coming from gold-gold than from deuteron-gold collisions. Scientists are intrigued by these distinctions, wh
I've work with this Quark-Gluon plasma stuff before. It's hot, so you all would-be couch plasma handlers out there please take care.
Now what about a beowolf cluster of those particles?
Now that would be what I'd call a bowl of hot grits!!!
I can't wait to get THEM down my pants!!
(not)
This is one of the lamest topics in quite some time.
I once gluoned the sole of my show that came off.
The money comes from defence contractors looking for new cool ways to kill, maim, or destroy. Hopefully we get more positive scientific advancements rather than a destructive force witnessed for a millionth of a second during an event that only theoretically happened.
:)
I am hoping for a planetary atmosphere renewer
But hey I think I just play too much MOO2.
[cx]
mod it up, ill fill your cup
mmmkay?
Without revealing any names, I will say that I am the son of the guy who was the project manager for Phenix. Phenix is one of the two big detectors at RHIC. I hear about the research going there on an almost daily basis.
I must say that the nature of ~ 80% of the posts here is completely misinformed crap! What I mean to say is that I am truly scared when I read the comments and know that Slashdot is supposed to be a haven for nerds and geeks. There are so many bogus things said in comments moderated above 1 that I can't address them all.
Good luck to you all...
P.S. Is it time for the real geeks and nerds here to abandon ship?