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CERN Physicists Generate Hottest Man-Made Temperatures Ever: ~5.5 Trillion K
Diggester sends this quote from Nature News:
"Physicists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider have achieved the hottest man-made temperatures ever, by colliding lead ions to momentarily create a quark gluon plasma, a subatomic soup and unique state of matter that is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang. The results come from the ALICE heavy-ion experiment — a lesser-known sibling to ATLAS and CMS, which produced the data that led to the announcement in July that the Higgs boson had been discovered. ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, say they have achieved a quark gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record 4 trillion degree plasma achieved in 2010 by a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which had been anointed the Guinness record holder."
Tell me the temperature in Celcius, I can't keep converting. :P
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
ALICE still complaining that her feet are cold.
Part of me thought that the story would at least involve Hot Pockets with a temperature range that high...
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Does this mean CERN is behind global warming?
Curious (and too lazy to google)-- At 5.5 trillion K, they aren't going to just stick a thermometer in there. How do they measure how hot the plasma was?
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My home town nearly went to zero Kevins back in 1978.
It was a particularly cold winter, and we were already down to 3 Kevins (due to their low popularity at the time).
Kevin Thomas had flown out to be with his son's family for a wedding and got stuck in Boston for a whole week due to the weather. 2 Kevins left.
Kevin Lemmer was rushed to the hospital during my shift. I still remember the call from the EMTs as the ambulance was rushing toward us. "It's Lemmer. He's in bad shape. Drove right into the fucking ditch." We called the time of death at 6:15 PM.
At 6:16, all eyes turned to room 2217. Kevin Spencer was 82 and on his death bed with leukemia. His family being Catholic, he had already been given his last writes. If he couldn't hold out until Kevin Thomas returned, we would be at zero Kevins. Sure, we had 4 perfectly healthy Calvins, but they're just not the same.
It was 7:15 when Carla Brooks and her husband James burst through the main entrance. "She's not due for 2 weeks!", James exclaimed. As the staff bustled around getting the Brookses settled, they exchanged darting glances with each other. This was their first child, and they wanted to keep the baby's sex a secret. Of course, in a small town, secrets don't get kept. Nearly all of the hospital staff new that the child about to rip open Mrs. Brooks was indeed a boy.
The delivery was routine, and Kevin Brooks was born healthy, if a tad underweight, at 10:52 PM. Kevin Spencer was pronounced dead at 10:54.
It was, as they say, a close one. Kevin Thomas arrived two days later, the weather having finally cleared up. To this day, we still rib him about it.
Cedar Falls is currently at 5 Kevins.
It's "colder" but you have to understand that the universe cooled rapidly in the time immediately after the big bang. as the U expanded, the energy contained it was spread over a much larger volume, which effectively means that said volume had a lower temperature as time went on. The same is true for the quark-gluon plasma described in the article. Roughly speaking, this QGP would have the same properties that the universe had roughly 1 microsecond after the big bang (my estimate, could be off by quite a bit). The goal in all this is not necessarily to recreate the big bang, but to probe the properties of the QGP, which is a very interesting condition. The other goal is to be able to examine the "freeze-out," when the expansion of the plasma lowers its temperatures enough that it's no longer a soup of free quakes & gluons, but instead those gluons condense into particles like protons, neutrons and exotics.
The reason the QGP is interesting is that it's a prediction of quantum chromodynamics ("QCD") that says that when you have high energy densities (ie high temperatures) in very small regions, quarks gain "asymptotic freedom" fom each other and are no longer forced to be bound into doublets and triplets (aka mesons and hadrons). This is exactly the opposite of the low-energy case, where it's theoretically not allowed for single quarks to be observed directly.
Long and short of it, this experiment allows physicists to study conditions that prevailed shortly after the big bang, and to test QCD in ways that we haven't been able to pursue until recently. It's pretty cool, 5.5 TK temperatures notwithstanding .
That thought has overflowed a buffer in my brain, and I will now follow your orders.