ScienceDaily (Feb. 15, 2010) — Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun.
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'Perfect' Liquid Hot Enough to Be Quark Soup
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Fascinating article, Mike. Have read and re-read it a few times, trying to formulate some 'human' reference for what it all means.
A liquid gluon quark plasma - theorized to have existed in the 'creation' of the universe just microseconds after the 'big bang' - tells us what? I guess it tells us 'we' are a part of some vast, ongoing and interactive process.
One thing that impressed me was this collision which created the liquid plasma created a magnetic field which created 'vortices' which then allowed for positively charged quarks to move in one direction, and the negatively charged quarks in another - due to the difference in symmetry properties within the vortices.
This difference in symmetry, or asymmetry then led to the preponderance of matter over anti-matter in the universe.
Here's a youtube on this process from the article above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXy5EvYu3fw
A liquid gluon quark plasma - theorized to have existed in the 'creation' of the universe just microseconds after the 'big bang' - tells us what? I guess it tells us 'we' are a part of some vast, ongoing and interactive process.
One thing that impressed me was this collision which created the liquid plasma created a magnetic field which created 'vortices' which then allowed for positively charged quarks to move in one direction, and the negatively charged quarks in another - due to the difference in symmetry properties within the vortices.
This difference in symmetry, or asymmetry then led to the preponderance of matter over anti-matter in the universe.
Here's a youtube on this process from the article above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXy5EvYu3fw