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

Recent events

[mao che minh]

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.

Applications?

[krisp]

Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research? How will it benifit mankind?

Re:Applications?

[The Only Druid]

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.).

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.

Re:Applications?

[Auckerman]

Sometimes applications of knowledge are either completely nonobvious or impossible to do at the time of the discovery. This is something people need to accept. Much like GPS was impossible to do even after we understood relativity, we may not see the practical results of this or any other fundamental research well into this century.

Re:Applications?

[Bootsy Collins]

Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research?

Need it have a "practical application"?

How will it benifit mankind?

Well, that's a very different question.

I don't think this will have any practical value, per se. Absolutely zero. Oh, it's possible that down the road someone much cleverer than I will come up with something. In fact, that's the normal way in which major technological advances have occurred. For instance, when Schottky began studying the quantum behavior of transition metals, he wasn't interested in the tiniest bit in any sort of practical application; he just wanted to understand the implications of quantum mechanics for electrons inside certain solids. If you had asked at the time, "what's the practical benefit of this work?" the answer would have been "zippo." And yet pretty much all of modern technology is based upon the transisitor that was so discovered. That's the way it's always been. Michael Faraday didn't really see any public benefit to understanding electromagnetism, either. Pure research has historically been without such obvious benefit.

But nevertheless, I don't want to suggest that that's the eventual result here, because I don't believe it will be. I think that would be disingenuous of me. I highly doubt that an improved understanding of the history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present will ever produce any wonderful and amazing technological advance. To me, the motivation is simply that understanding and knowledge -- especially of something like how the Universe got to be the way it is, and why it works the way it does -- is inherently a good thing. It has value by definition. Perhaps my least favorite thing about our society is that we are trained to evaluate the worth of things in terms of their economic value. Just like love, understanding has its own value, in my mind -- bereft of any "practical" value.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. 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. Only elements as heavy as carbon or lighter can be formed in the early universe; for heavier elements, you need a star. Now, if you didn't already know this, stop and think about it for a second. A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time. It appears that you and I are star debris. And it gets even better. The way that large amounts of these elements, forged within a star, can get out of the star is if the star supernovas -- dies at the end of its lifetime with a big boom. That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away. There's uranium, and other similar very heavy elements, on our planet. Do you see what I'm getting at? Much of the atoms that make all of us up, that make this planet up, were at one time inside a star (or stars) that lived its life, supernovaed, and spewed out its stellar debris with heavy elements. Eventually, maybe a few hundred million years later, that stuff is part of our planet, part of our atmosphere, our water, part of you and me. We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.

Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.

Understanding has its own value.

Re:Applications?

[ErfC]

Hear, hear! (Here, here? I can never remember.)

Richard Feynmann also put it well:

Science is like sex: occasionally something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it.

Re:Applications?

[Manic Ken]

It's early (or late..)for me but this is not what I read:
from the metaresearch link:

2. What relativistic effects on GPS atomic clocks might be seen? General Relativity (GR) predicts that clocks in a stronger gravitational field will tick at a slower rate. Special Relativity (SR) predicts that moving clocks will appear to tick slower than non-moving ones. Remarkably, these two effects cancel each other for clocks located at sea level anywhere on Earth. So if a hypothetical clock at Earthâ(TM)s north or south pole is used as a reference, a clock at Earthâ(TM)s equator would tick slower because of its relative speed due to Earthâ(TM)s spin, but faster because of its greater distance from Earthâ(TM)s center of mass due to the flattening of the Earth. Because Earthâ(TM)s spin rate determines its shape, these two effects are not independent, and it is therefore not entirely coincidental that the effects exactly cancel. The cancellation is not general, however. Clocks at any altitude above sea level do tick faster than clocks at sea level; and clocks on rocket sleds do tick slower than stationary clocks. For GPS satellites, GR predicts that the atomic clocks at GPS orbital altitudes will tick faster by about 45,900 ns/day because they are in a weaker gravitational field than atomic clocks on Earth's surface. Special Relativity (SR) predicts that atomic clocks moving at GPS orbital speeds will tick slower by about 7,200 ns/day than stationary ground clocks. Rather than have clocks with such large rate differences, the satellite clocks are reset in rate before launch to compensate for these predicted effects. In practice, simply changing the international definition of the number of atomic transitions that constitute a one-second interval accomplishes this goal. Therefore, we observe the clocks running at their offset rates before launch. Then we observe the clocks running after launch and compare their rates with the predictions of relativity, both GR and SR combined. If the predictions are right, we should see the clocks run again at nearly the same rates as ground clocks, despite using an offset definition for the length of one second. We note that this post-launch rate comparison is independent of frame or observer considerations. Since the ground tracks repeat day after day, the distance from satellite to ground remains essentially unchanged. Yet, any rate difference between satellite and ground clocks continues to build a larger and larger time reading difference as the days go by. Therefore, no confusion can arise due to the satellite clock being located some distance away from the ground clock when we compare their time readings. One only needs to wait long enough and the time difference due to a rate discrepancy will eventually exceed any imaginable error source or ambiguity in such comparisons.
Different effects cancel eachother?
Is this what I read. And (this is what I read some where else) we wouldnt do anything different if it we never had GR or SR.

Scary Thought

[mgcsinc]

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...

Re:Scary Thought

[localghost]

1e12ÂF is 5.56e11ÂC. 1e12ÂC is 1.8e12ÂF. While any of those numbers could be accurately described as "fucking HOT", it still makes a difference. Whether it starts at absolute 0, or 273ÂK above 0 probably doesn't make any difference at this order of magnitude, though.

Gluons?

[grub]

I've heard of strap-ons, wouldn't a gluon hurt when removed?

disappointing

[Boromir son of Faram]

I was all excited about this at first, but it turns out that it's just a milestone in the search for quark-gluon plasma. I guess I'll have to put up with plain old photon-muon plasma for a couple more years.

BNL

[das_katz_socrates]

"The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL..."

Who would've thought that the musical group Bare Naked Ladies ran linux.

"Quark-Gluon Plasma"

[GoofyBoy]

Give Star Trek writers a larger vocabulary.

"Captian, it will take at least an hour to clean the quantum-transductor of all residual Quark-Gluon plasma!"

Applications ? Oh well...

[McSnarf]

...the most well-known example of pure science known to man is electricity. Why bother with something that can make frog's legs kick ?

Experience has shown that "pure" research often leads to applications the researchers never imagined.

Cutting research to areas with "immediate applicability" is quite in fashion in some circles. (The same circles, coincidentally, that do not usually do something for the benefit of mankind. Corporates come to mind.)

Re:Applications ? Oh well...

[Tim C]

...and almost every component in it is based on the results of pure, academic research that was performed with no immediate apparent application.

The laser, for example, was a curiosity sat around in research labs for a decade or more before anyone thought of anything to do with it.

Also reported in Physics News Update 642

[prestidigital]

I don't know what half this stuff means. But I think it's cool that someone else does.

Here's the body of the email update:

INTRIGUING ODDITIES IN HIGH-ENERGY NUCLEAR COLLISIONS. Missing
debris in the smashup between gold nuclei going at close to the
speed of light suggests the creation of a highly unusual plasma
environment, researchers have announced at Brookhaven National
Laboratory. By smashing together gold ions at Brookhaven's
Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), scientists are attempting to
make and study a state of matter that existed only millionths of a
second after the big bang. Called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), it is
a hot, dense soup of individual quarks and gluons. In today's
universe, by contrast, quarks come in groups of twos and threes,
held together by gluons. This spring, Brookhaven researchers
performed a "control" experiment, in which they collided a gold
nucleus with a deuteron, a light nucleus consisting of just a proton
and neutron. In these and other kinds of nuclear collisions, a pair
of quarks from a proton or neutron occasionally gets ejected. In
turn each ejected quark produces a stream or "jet" of particles in
its wake. In some of the gold-deuteron collisions, the researchers
indeed observed pairs of jets flying in opposite directions. But in
head-to-head collisions between two gold nuclei, researchers
observed only one, rather than two, jets. This property, called jet
quenching, suggests that the particle jet traveling in the direction
of the collision region is getting absorbed by a hot, dense state of
matter. Jet quenching is predicted to occur in the correspondingly
hot, dense environment of a quark-gluon plasma, but RHIC
experimentalists are not ready to claim the QGP prize quite yet. To
verify its presence and rule out rival scenarios, they are planning
numerous other experiments for finding other signatures of a QGP.
However, the new data has convinced Columbia theorist Miklos
Gyulassy that the RHIC team is already seeing a QGP (see
http://www-cunuke.phys.columbia.edu/people/g yulass y/Welcome.html).
The gold-gold collisions, he and his colleagues calculate, produce
an environment 100 times denser than ordinary nuclear matter and
display properties predicted in QGP models based on quantum
chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force which holds
nuclei together. On June 18, three of the four RHIC experimental
groups have submitted papers on the new results to Physical Review
Letters and researchers discussed these new results at a special
Brookhaven colloquium today. (Brookhaven press release, June 11,
http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr 06110 3.htm.)

Re:OK...

[jandrese]

Isn't this the same thing they said about Lasers in the 50s?

Units?

[wcspxyx]

From the article:

The top, purple band is the realm where QGP can exist, at very high temperatures above 1,000,000,000,000 degrees.

Is that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?

Re:OK...

[warpSpeed]

But where, ultimately, does this research lead?

We will not know until we get there...

I believe that there is far too little basic research going on these days.

There is nothing more basic then finding out how all this matter/energy around us works.

Re:OK...

[Telastyn]

Well, let's see... One time the cavemen managed to smash certain rocks together and reliably get sparks -> fire. Pretty much the basis of civilization...

Coolest name for matter ever!

[foo fighter]

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!

Actually...

[blamanj]

The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter.

...it's a 13.7 billion year old state of matter.

Re:OK...

[mhore]

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?

I think this is possibly why you lost interest in physics. We're not always interested in the APPLICATION of knowledge. Sometimes, we just like to know why a particular thing is like it is. We leave the application to the engineers and business men.

Basic Introduction

[HughJampton]

Here's a decent Nature article on QGP http://www.nature.com/nsu/000217/000217-5.html

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."

Re:Those damn humans!

[confused one]

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...

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

Coverage on Ch. 12, Long Island's News Station

[StefanJ]

Interdimensional Gateway Opens in Suffolk County.

Elder Gods awake from aeons of slumber.

Film at Eleven.