From Brookhaven Lab: “RHIC’s Perfect Liquid a Study in Perfection”

Brookhaven Lab

June 17, 2013
Karen McNulty Walsh

Systematic analysis of particle flow in heavy ion experiments suggests that RHIC’s shear viscosity is close to ideal limit

“When heavy ions (the nuclei of heavy atoms such as gold and lead) collide at high energies at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the components of the nuclei (protons and neutrons) melt to form a hot soup of their constituent particles, quarks and gluons. A new model that accurately describes the experimentally observed patterns of particles flowing out from this ‘quark-gluon plasma’ (QGP) suggests that the effective shear viscosity, or resistance to flow, is close to the ideal limit used to define a ‘perfect’ fluid.

Bjoern Schenke, right, chats with fellow Brookhaven Lab nuclear theorist Raju Venugopalan, at last summer’s Quark Matter meeting in Washington, D.C. Schenke recently won a Young Scientist Prize in nuclear physics from the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics.

‘Our result is consistent across finer and finer detailed analyses of particle flow patterns,’ said Bjoern Schenke, a Goldhaber Fellow in the nuclear theory group at Brookhaven Lab and a coauthor on a paper describing the analyses in Physical Review Letters published earlier this year.

‘These findings help answer the question of how perfect the perfect liquid QGP created at RHIC is—that is, how close the viscosity comes to a limit derived from quantum mechanics—and how this property varies with temperature. Our findings indicate that viscosity increases away from the ideal limit with the increasing temperatures reached at LHC,’ Schenke said.

The findings will also help scientists better understand how the internal characteristics of the heavy ions before they collide—particularly dense concentrations of gluons known as color glass condensate—shape the initial collision geometry and rapidly turn into the liquid quark-gluon plasma. “

See the full article here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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From Brookhaven Lab: “Accelerating Particles Accelerates Science — With Big Benefits for Society”

Brookhaven Lab

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT. RHIC IS UNDER PRESSURE BECAUSE OF U.S. BUDGETARY CONSTRAINTS. RHIC, THE RELATIVISTIC HEAVY ION COLLIDER, IS THE LAST GREAT PARTICLE ACCELERATOR IN THE U.S. IT CONTINUES TO DO CUTTING EDGE BASIC RESEARCH.

March 13, 2013
Karen McNulty Walsh

“Tackling the most challenging problems in accelerator science attracts the world’s best and brightest to Brookhaven Lab. It’s only natural that ideas and techniques born here take root in new research facilities around the world — and spark a host of spin-off applications for industry, medicine, national security, and more.

Twin accelerators: RHIC is really two accelerators in one — made of crisscrossing rings of superconducting magnets, enclosed in a tunnel 2.4 miles in circumference. In the two rings, beams of heavy ions are accelerated to nearly the speed of light in opposite directions, held in their orbits by powerful magnetic fields.

Some would call the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) — an ‘atom smasher‘ at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory — the most modern accelerator facility in the world. Many ideas about how to accelerate, focus and collide beams of particles that were tried unsuccessfully elsewhere have succeeded at RHIC. And as scientists’ understanding of the early-universe matter created in RHIC’s light-speed collisions has evolved, so too has the collider itself —to probe ever deeper into the mysteries of how this primordial matter gave rise to the visible structure of the universe today.

The machine, which steers beams of billions of ions into collisions thousands of times per second, is operating at 15 times the level of performance for which it was designed.

‘The versatility, performance, and improvements to this machine have been nothing short of astounding,’ said Thomas Roser, who heads the Collider-Accelerator Department at Brookhaven Lab.

The RHIC accelerator complex: The particle smashups recreating early universe conditions at RHIC depend on a chain of accelerators to bring ions up to speed. Several links in the chain have interesting histories and applications beyond physics.

Unlike any other collider in the world, RHIC can collide a variety of ions — from single protons to uranium nuclei, one of the heaviest naturally occurring atoms — at a very wide range of energies. This versatility allows physicists to explore the mysterious world of quark interactions and the strange and unexpected features of the strong force — including details of the transition from ordinary matter to what the universe looked like some 13.7 billion years ago.

The success of RHIC is particularly impressive given that, at the beginning, scientists weren’t sure it would work. ‘Never before was a collider made to collide heavy ions,’ said Thomas Hemmick, a physicist at Stony Brook University and a collaborator on RHIC research. ‘There were many new challenges that were absolutely enormous.’

Throughout the design and construction of RHIC in the 1980s and 1990s, nuclear and accelerator physicists — and students from all over the world — wanted to work on the project. Stony Brook, the university closest to Brookhaven, was a natural partner.

‘Many successful students were coming to Stony Brook, some didn’t even know accelerator physics was an option,’ Hemmick said, ‘but collaborations started to happen naturally because of the proximity of the Lab and the expertise of its physicists.’

Now Hemmick is helping to foster a climate that nurtures those attracted to the scientific and technological challenges presented by RHIC and accelerator science in general. Together with Brookhaven physicist Vladimir Litvinenko, Hemmick co-directs the Center for Accelerator Science and Education (CASE), a unique joint university-laboratory graduate and post-graduate program focused on developing the next crop of accelerator scientists and engineers.

The Center for Accelerator Science and Education (CASE) helps to build America’s future high-tech workforce. Here high-school students and teachers participating in a CASE workshop visit the RHIC accelerator tunnel.

Medical advances

For example, Brookhaven is one of just two facilities in the U.S. that produces high-demand, short-supply radioactive isotopes used in heart-disease diagnosis, and Brookhaven scientists are actively exploring new applications in cancer diagnosis and treatment. The Brookhaven Linac Isotope Producer (BLIP) produces these isotopes by bombarding specific materials with protons that are accelerated through the 200-million-electron-volt (MeV) linear accelerator, or linac,’ portion of the RHIC accelerator complex, piggybacking on ongoing RHIC operations funding.

Whether you know it or not, accelerators play a role in many aspects of our lives. The U.S. Department of Energy—whose Office of Science funds the research at RHIC—estimates that there are 30,000 accelerators operating in world. Many of these are small and conduct behind-the-scenes work: producing beams of radiation used to sterilize medical equipment and keep pathogens at bay in our food supply, imprinting computer chips with ions to improve their performance, producing radioisotopes for cancer diagnosis and treatment, and scanning shipping containers for illicit materials.

The RHIC research program also inspired the U.S. space agency to build and operate its NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL) at Brookhaven, using beams that come from RHIC’s Booster to simulate the kind of particle radiation that permeates deep space. Studies of how these particles affect cells, DNA samples, electronics, and shielding materials are helping scientists evaluate risks and test strategies to protect future astronauts and satellites. Studying the biological effects of radiation in this manner is also offering new insight into our understanding of cancer and the body’s defense mechanisms.

Scientists at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory bombard cells, DNA, and electronic equipment with beams that simulate deep space particle radiation to better understand risks and design protective strategies.

Magnets for energy storage

Materials used in accelerator design are also finding new applications. Most of RHIC’s magnets, for example, are made of superconductors — remarkable materials that conduct electricity with no energy loss when kept extremely cool. The design of these magnets has made Brookhaven a world-leader in magnet design and the study of superconducting systems, including more recently discovered superconductors that operate at temperatures above a deep chill, which offer enormous promise for future applications.

Even the future of accelerator science at RHIC — a proposed Electron Ion Collider known as eRHIC — offers promise of applications beyond its role as a tool for investigating the structure of matter. The idea is to add an electron ring to the existing RHIC tunnel so high-speed electrons can probe the inner structure of heavy ions.

I have included way too much of this article, but in the hope that you will visit the article yourself and see the very large amount of data I left out. Please visit the full article here. The U.S., in fact the whole scientific world needs RHIC to continue being supported by the D.O.E. Office of Science.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. The Laboratory’s almost 3,000 scientists, engineers, and support staff are joined each year by more than 5,000 visiting researchers from around the world.Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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From Brookhaven Lab via Quantum Diaries: “Polarized Proton Data Flowing With RHIC Running”

This post was written by Brookhaven Lab scientists Shigeki Misawa and Ofer Rind.

“Run 13 at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) began one month ago today, and the first particles collided in the STAR and PHENIX detectors nearly two weeks ago. As of late this past Saturday evening, preparations are complete and polarized protons are colliding with the machine and detectors operating in physics mode,’ which means gigabytes of data are pouring into the RHIC & ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) every few seconds.

RHIC at Brookhaven

CERN ATLAS at the LHC

Today, we store data and provide the computing power for about 2,500 RHIC scientists here at Brookhaven Lab and institutions around the world. Approximately 30 people work at the RACF, which is located about one mile south of RHIC and connected to both the Physics and Information Technology Division buildings on site. There are four main parts to the RACF: computers that crunch the data, online storage containing data ready for further analysis, tape storage containing archived data from collisions past, and the network glue that holds it all together. Computing resources at the RACF are split about equally between the RHIC collaborations and the ATLAS experiment running at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.”

Shigeki Misawa (left) and Ofer Rind at the RHIC & ATLAS Computing Facility (RACF) at Brookhaven Lab

There is a lot going on here. See the full article here.

Participants in Quantum Diaries:

Fermilab

Triumf

US/LHC Blog

CERN

Brookhaven Lab

KEK

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From Brookhaven: “On the Mark and Set for RHIC Run 13″

Brookhaven Lab

Cool-down begins at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider [RHIC]

“The refrigeration system at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is humming to life today, beginning cool-down of the magnets in the 2.4-mile-circumference accelerator ring at Brookhaven Lab. Temperatures inside the magnets will ultimately reach a frigid four degrees Kelvin (-452 degrees Fahrenheit) as Run 13 at RHIC gets underway. When collisions begin next week, scientists from Brookhaven and around the world will collect data from particles emerging from the particle smashups to try to solve one of the biggest mysteries of the basic building blocks of matter—the puzzle of the proton’s ‘missing’ spin.

‘Recent data from RHIC show for the first time that gluons carry some of the proton’s spin; we now want to find out whether the same is true for antiquarks. RHIC has the unique capability for doing this,’ said Berndt Mueller, who was recently named the Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics.

RHIC is the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider in the world where scientists can collide polarized protons—bunches of 100 billion protons all spinning like gyroscopes with their axes aligned in a particular direction. Collisions between two beams of these polarized protons are key to the quest to understand the subatomic components that make up the proton—quarks and gluons—and how those pieces contribute to the proton’s overall spin. RHIC operators will spend most of Run 13 colliding these polarized protons at 255 billion electron volts (GeV) for proton spin research.

Protons, Quarks and Gluons Spin—But the Numbers Don’t Add Up

‘Protons’ quarks, antiquarks, gluons and other pieces all contribute fractions of the proton’s spin,’ explained Jamie Dunlop, a deputy spokesperson for the STAR collaboration, one of the two experiments at RHIC. ‘If you add everything up, including the motion of the quarks, antiquarks, and gluons, they have to add up to the whole of the proton’s spin. But we don’t know what fraction is in the spin of the antiquarks and gluons, and in the internal motion of all these particles inside the proton.’

STAR

‘New detectors at both STAR and PHENIX give us the ability to track particles called W bosons that emerge from collisions,’ Dunlop said. ‘These W bosons can be used as probes to quantify spin contributions from a proton’s antiquarks and from different flavors of quarks.

PHENIX

Teasing apart these subtle contributions is essential to help reveal the complexity that resides within one of the most seemingly simple objects on Earth, explained Dave Morrison, a co-spokesperson for the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC.

‘Protons are the most simple of all stable states of QCD matter,’ he said, referring to matter made of quarks and gluons whose interactions are described by a theory called quantum chromodynamics (QCD). ‘The equation for QCD can be written in one line, but it’s taken us 40 years of theory and experimentation to get to the point we’re at today, he said.

Tracking Particles at STAR and PHENIX

Using muon detectors contained inside the funnel-shaped sides of the PHENIX experiment, collaborators will study the production of W bosons and learn about how up and down quarks contribute to the spin of the proton.

Using muon detectors contained inside the funnel-shaped sides of the PHENIX experiment, collaborators will study the production of W bosons and learn about how up and down quarks contribute to the spin of the proton.

During Run 13, the STAR collaboration will track W bosons with a forward GEM tracker that was tested during Run 12 and is now ready for serious use. GEM stands for gaseous electron multiplier. The state-of-the-art detector relies not on wires, but sheets of plastic film coated with copper with holes punched in it (like Gore-Tex) to amplify the path and charge of collision debris with accuracy of 100-150 microns—about the width of a hair.”

See the full article here.

The future of RHIC is problematic. The U.S. budget for the D.O.E. Office of Science is under severe pressure. Along with RHIC at Brookhaven, the NIF at Livermore is also in danger of being shut down. The members of our Congress continually show their ignorance of the value of basic scientific research. In the end, we may see a repeat of the stupidly short-sighted view that resulted in 1993 in the shutting down of the construction of the Superconducting Super Collider.

Brookhaven campus

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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From Fermilab: “Physics in a Nutshell – The atom splashers”

Fermilab is an enduring source of strength for the US contribution to scientific research world wide.

Friday, Jan. 18, 2013
Jim Pivarski

“In most particle physics experiments, physicists attempt to concentrate as much energy as possible into a point of space. This allows the formation of new, exotic particles like Higgs bosons that reveal the basic workings of the universe. Other collider experiments have a different goal: to spread the energy among enough particles to make a continuous medium, a droplet of fluid millions of times hotter than the center of the sun. The latter studies, often referred to as heavy-ion physics, require collisions of large nuclei, such as gold or lead, to produce amorphous splashes instead of point-like collisions.

Quark-gluon Plasma at Brookhaven’s RHIC (image NSCL)

This short-lived state of quark matter is unlike any other known to science. All other liquids, gases, gels and plasmas are governed by forces that weaken with distance… In contrast, the quarks and gluons loosed by a heavy-ion collision are attracted to one another by the nuclear strong force, which does not weaken with distance. As two quarks start to separate from each other, new pairs of quarks and antiquarks join the mix with an attraction of their own.

Quark matter is the stuff the big bang was made of. In the first microseconds of the universe, all matter was a freely flowing quark-gluon soup [*], which later evaporated into the protons and neutrons that we know today. Yet it is far from understood.

Heavy-ion collisions in the LHC and RHIC at Brookhaven will tell us more about the origin of our universe.

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collier (RHIC) at Brookhaven

CMS – the home of QGP research at CERN’s LHC
See the full article here.

*Often described as “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP)

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a US Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics.

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From Brookhaven: "Gluon Walls: A New Form of Matter?" A Conversation

Brookhaven Lab

January 7, 2013
Karen McNulty Walsh

A conversation about “color glass condensate” and the structure of visible matter in the universe, with Brookhaven theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan

Brookhaven theoretical physicist Raju Venugopalan

“Q. We’ve heard a lot recently about a “new form of matter” possibly seen at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe — a state of saturated gluons called ‘color glass condensate.’ Brookhaven Lab, and you in particular, have a long history with this idea. Can you tell me a bit about that history?

A. The idea for the color glass condensate arose to help us understand heavy ion collisions at our own collider here at Brookhaven, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—even before RHIC turned on in 2000, and long before the LHC was built. These machines are designed to look at the most fundamental constituents of matter and the forces through which they interact—the same kinds of studies that a century ago led to huge advances in our understanding of electrons and magnetism. Only now instead of studying the behavior of the electrons that surround atomic nuclei, we are probing the subatomic particles that make up the nuclei themselves, and studying how they interact via nature’s strongest force to “give shape” to the universe today.

Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)

We do that by colliding nuclei at very high energies to recreate the conditions of the early universe so we can study these particles and their interactions under the most extreme conditions. But when you collide two nuclei and produce matter at RHIC, and also at the LHC, you have to think about the matter that makes up the nuclei you are colliding. What is the structure of nuclei before they collide?

Q. Have we seen hints that this color glass condensate exists at RHIC?

A. The very first experimental hints of color glass condensate came from early collisions of gold ions at RHIC in 2000 and more significantly later from collisions of light deuterium ions with the heavier gold ions. The precursor for the LHC phenomenon was seen around 2006 by scientists from RHIC’s STAR collaboration and subsequently PHENIX and PHOBOS. They all saw signs that particles streaming out of the collisions were correlated in an interesting and surprising way that showed up as a little bump on the graph—which we called a “ridge” because it looked like a mountain ridge. RHIC and LHC scientists now use sophisticated analyses to break down this signal into subtle wiggles of varying strengths, which can be further analyzed.”

PHENIX

STAR

[IT WILL TRULY BE A PITY AND A SHAME IF WE LOSE RHIC TO BUDGET CUTS. RHIC IS ONE OF THE MOST SUCCESSFUL AND PRODUCTIVE MACHINES EVER BUILT FOR SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY]

See the full conversation here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

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From Cern Courier: “CMS studies the quark–gluon plasma”

Aug 16, 2012
No Writer Credit

“Since the first collisions of lead ions in the LHC in November 2010, the CMS heavy-ion physics programme has been delivering exciting results at a steady pace, revealing more and more about the properties of nuclear matter at extremely high energy-density and temperature.

CMS

When atomic nuclei collide at high energies, they are expected to “melt” into a quark–gluon plasma (QGP) – a hot and dense medium made out of partons (quarks and gluons). At the LHC, many of the observed properties of the produced matter are consistent with this picture, similar to earlier findings by experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory and at CERN’s Super Proton Synchrotron. The quantitative characterization of this medium is still far from complete, but with more than an order of magnitude increase in the collision energy, the LHC is providing a tremendous opportunity to extend the studies.”

See the full article here.

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From Brookhaven Lab: “Hot Nuclear Matter Featured in Science”

Brookhaven Lab

Prelude to new RHIC/LHC findings to be presented at Quark Matter 2012

July 19, 2012
Karen McNulty Walsh

” A review article appearing in the July 20, 2012, issue of the journal Science describes groundbreaking discoveries that have emerged from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, synergies with the heavy-ion program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, and the compelling questions that will drive this research forward on both sides of the Atlantic. With details that help enlighten our understanding of the hot nuclear matter that permeated the early universe, the article is a prelude to the latest findings scientists from both facilities will present at the next gathering of physicists dedicated to this research — Quark Matter 2012, August 12-18 in Washington, D.C.

RHIC’s two large experiments, STAR and PHENIX, have multiple detector components and complex electronics for tracking and identifying the particles that fly out after ions collide at nearly the speed of light.

This Brookhaven article then proceeds to provide us with what looks to be the article from The Journal Science.

See the full Brookhaven article here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

From Brookhaven Lab: “Brookhaven Lab Collider Crucial to Future of Nuclear Physics”

Brookhaven Lab

National Research Council report details breakthroughs at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and its key role in the field over the next decade

July 3, 2012
Karen McNulty Walsh
Peter Genzer

In a new report on the current status and future of nuclear physics, the National Research Council (NRC) highlights the “spectacular” performance and critical future role of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Central to the past decade’s experimental milestones and future innovations sits Brookhaven Lab’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile accelerator that produces states of matter unseen since the first moments after the Big Bang.

As the report states, ‘Experiments at RHIC allow nuclear scientists (in the United States, at 59 universities and six national laboratories in 29 states) to answer questions about the microsecond-old universe that cannot be answered by any conceivable astronomical observations made with telescopes and satellites.’

The leading conclusion of the decadal report recommends that “exploiting strategic investments should be an essential component of the U.S. nuclear science program in the coming decade.” The existing infrastructure and expansive versatility of RHIC place Brookhaven’s accelerator in an ideal position to fulfill that mission.

‘We are especially encouraged because the recently completed upgrade of RHIC luminosities is one of two strategic investments explicitly called out in the preamble to that conclusion,’ said physicist Steven Vigdor, head of Brookhaven’s nuclear and particle physics program. ‘We were able to complete that upgrade about five years faster and at one-seventh the cost envisioned in the 2007 Long Range Plan for U.S. Nuclear Science, thanks to advanced R&D on new accelerator technologies at RHIC.’”

See the full article here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.

From Brookhaven Lab: “Brewing the World’s Hottest Guinness”

Brookhaven Lab

June 25, 2012
Justin Eure

“Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes particles together to recreate the incredible conditions that only existed at the dawn of time. The 2.4-mile underground atomic “racetrack” at RHIC produces fundamental insights about the laws underlying all visible matter. But along the way, its particles also smashed a world record.

Protons, neutrons melt to produce ‘quark-gluon plasma’ at RHIC (no image credit)

Guinness World Records, no longer encumbered by “book of,” recognized Brookhaven Lab for achieving the “Highest Man-Made Temperature.” When RHIC collides gold ions at nearly the speed of light, the impact energy becomes so intense that the neutrons and protons inside the gold nuclei “melt,” releasing fundamental quarks and gluons that then form a nearly friction-free primordial plasma that only existed in Nature about a millionth of one second after the Big Bang. RHIC discovered this primordial, liquid-like quark-gluon plasma and measured its temperature at around 4 trillion degrees Celsius – that’s 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun.

‘There are many cool things about this ultra-hot matter,’ said physicist Steven Vigdor, who leads Brookhaven’s nuclear and particle physics program. ‘We expected to reach these temperatures – that is, after all, why RHIC was built – but we did not at all anticipate the nearly perfect liquid behavior.’”

Cool video from the article.

See the full article here.

One of ten national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical, and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers. Brookhaven is operated and managed for DOE’s Office of Science by Brookhaven Science Associates, a limited-liability company founded by Stony Brook University, the largest academic user of Laboratory facilities, and Battelle, a nonprofit, applied science and technology organization.