Lab Produces 3.6 Billion Degree Gas

starexplorer2001 writes "LiveScience is reporting how scientists at Sandia's Z laboratory have produced superheated gas exceeding temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit (2 billion kelvins). That's hotter than the interior of our sun, which is only 15 million degrees F. And they don't know how they did it. Do we want anything that hot on our planet?"

Comments

"Some unknown energy source is involved"

[Farrside]

Bwah? That's the most interesting part, to me. I mean, they MUST have had that sucker plugged into a surge protector. From where did the energy appear?

Re:"Some unknown energy source is involved"

[bloobloo]

Or instruments that are not calibrated to measure a temperature that high accurately.

How did they measure it ?

[distributed]

and I RTFA.

Re:How did they measure it ?

[nleaf]

The way that the temperatures of things like plasmas are measured is to measure the radiation emitted by them as they cool. The way a spectrometer works is by measuring the properties of radiation, wavelength for instance, and use whatever various physical laws to work out the temperature of the plasma based on that measurement. The spectrometer is never really in the plasma like a thermometer in water.

As far as the submitter's comments about whether we want such a hot thing on earth, it may be high temperature, but most experimental plasmas are extremely low density. Even if the plasma somehow ruptured its container and shot out around the lab, you'd never notice a change in temperature--especially since the plasma would only be around for something on the order of nanoseconds (going from memory here, might be less than that).

Re:The article is really confusing....

[Manchot]

Well, in particle accelerators like the RHIC, temperature doesn't really have a lot of meaning. Temperature is a statistical quantity, and depends on the presence of many particles to be adequately defined. In colliders, only a couple particles are present, which happen to be accelerated to high velocities (and therefore high "temperatures"). However, the article seems to imply that many particles were involved in the experiment.

Re:Do we want this?

[Omnifarious]

It also sounds like they don't think it's because of fusion. If the ions involved are Fe ions, then you wouldn't expect to get any energy from fusion from them.

Maybe the energy is coming from strong force interactions of some sort. It sounds like the temperatures were high enough that maybe there was some sort of quark-gluon plasma thing going on.

the laws of thermodynamics...

[knapper_tech]

...exist to protect humankind from destruction. Experiments where output >> input with no explanation have an amazing potential to result in new Arizona beachfront property and still no explanation. I for one hope the next step into this effect is not too successful.

The laws of the universe have finally come out of hiding and revealed to us that energy is an illusion and the abundance thereof is merely the lack of any continents at rest.

Just out of curiosity, what does that temperature imply about the velocity of the atoms in order to have that kind of average KE? is it fast enough to have relativistic significance?

Lithium not Iron

[squoyster]

They should try lithium wires instead of iron. The lower atomic weight may allow a fusion reaction to start and convert the Li into heavier elements until significant amounts of Fe are produced by the reaction. After that, the whole thing blows up ... or something like that.

Re:Do we want this?

[Perdo]

Nice, You have successfully unified Descarte's "I think therefore I am" with Schrodinger's cat, and you are immortal in this universe because you are always observing and can not take the dead cat path.

Only one problem: Your universe only exists as long as you do.

Damned if you do.

Re:The article is really confusing....

[sjames]

I would counter that by pointing out that a gold-gold ion collision on RHIC involves at least ~1200 particles (3 quarks per nucleon and a mass of ~200 AMU(daltons) per ion). this is to say nothing of the millions of particles that are created at the collision point and then explode outward (the kinetic energy of the fast ions is converted to mass).

The thousands (not millions) of particles in RHIC do not constitute a plasma. They are individual particles. Properly, the record is for temperature of a plasma. I do not know the formal definition (if there IS one) of the cutoff point between many discrete particles and a proper plasma, and there may be a grey area between the two categories, but the RHIC collision results and the Z machine results are well on either side of such a threshold.

3rd life for the machine

[jbeaupre]

Growing up in Albuquerque, I got a chance to tour the machine they are using. Almost 20 years ago! One of the coolest aspects, besides the famous light show, is that they built the original machine for something like $10 mil and keep finding new uses for it. It's just a giant capacitor, so scientists keep thinking of new uses. I forget the orginal use. Light ion fusion reactor or something. Then it was converted to a heavy ion reactor. Now the Z-pinch configuration. It might have had a few incarnations in between. But it's great to see such a useful tool being resused for great science and that doesn't cost a billion dollars.

Oh, and Trekkies: the control room is, or was, has connections to the bridge of the Enterprise, including a places for Kirk et al with nameplates.