Perfect way to study big bang
25 Jul 2005 by Evoluted New Media
Whilst exploring the very beginning of the universe, scientists have unexpectedly come across what they have called the most perfect fluid ever created
Whilst exploring the very beginning of the universe, scientists have unexpectedly come across what they have called the most perfect fluid ever created.
When physicists recently created the state of matter thought to have filled the universe just after the big bang, they found it to be like a liquid and not, as expected, a gas.
The collective movement of the fluid suggests that it possesses an extremely low viscosity, making it what physicists call a perfect fluid. “No one predicted it would be a liquid,” said Professor John Nelson from the University of Birmingham, who heads the British involvement in the work. He told Laboratory News: “A liquid is something that if you push in one side the other side moves. This is known as collective movement, not the every particle for its self, free-for-all that is expected from a gas.”
The new state of matter was forged in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), situated at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, New York. By colliding the central cores of gold atoms together, head-on at almost the speed of light, the researchers created a fleeting, microscopic version of the Universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.
This included achieving a temperature of several million million degrees (about 150,000 times the temperature at the centre of the Sun). Professor Nelson explained to Laboratory News: “When things are very hot indeed, you can split matter up into its constituent parts. In this case we split protons and neutrons into their constituent quarks and gluons.”
It was this quark-gloun plasma that is thought to behave like a perfect liquid. It is hoped that the experiment, and others like it, will further our understanding of the early formation of the universe.
When two gold nuclei collide in the RHIC particle accelerator, they produce a cascade of new particles. Each line on this image shows the path of one of those particles.
