Particle Collider Experiment Recreates the Big Bang's Primordial Soup - and Finds Unexpected Pattern (livescience.com) 17
"Physicists smashed gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light and found an unexpected pattern in the particles..." writes Live Science.
"If confirmed, that pattern could help reveal how the hot soup of quarks and gluons that filled the universe in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang cooled and condensed into the protons and neutrons that make up ordinary matter today."
In every collision, particles are flung out sideways; how hard they are flung, on average, varies slightly from one collision to the next. Physicists expected the size of these variations to change smoothly as they adjusted the collision energy. Instead, the variations dipped, shrinking and then growing again. This dip could be a sign of a long-sought "critical point," a special set of conditions at which nuclear matter changes the way it transforms from one form to another.
The signal, detected by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, is strong enough that it is very unlikely to be a statistical accident. However, the researchers cautioned that the dip is a tantalizing hint, not proof of the long-sought transition. They published their findings Sept. 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters...
The team analyzed roughly 1 billion collisions, measuring how hard charged particles were flung sideways out of the fireball, according to the article.
The dip "does point to a set of conditions where the behavior of nuclear matter changes, and it gives theorists a new, precise measurement to test their calculations against," study co-author Rutik Manikandhan, told Live Science.
The signal, detected by the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, is strong enough that it is very unlikely to be a statistical accident. However, the researchers cautioned that the dip is a tantalizing hint, not proof of the long-sought transition. They published their findings Sept. 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters...
The team analyzed roughly 1 billion collisions, measuring how hard charged particles were flung sideways out of the fireball, according to the article.
The dip "does point to a set of conditions where the behavior of nuclear matter changes, and it gives theorists a new, precise measurement to test their calculations against," study co-author Rutik Manikandhan, told Live Science.
Electron shells from electron chickens (Score:1)
It's all Shark-Gluon Soup(TM) all the way down!
Re: (Score:2)
Soup of the day.
Why did the soup make atoms ? (Score:2)
I mean, if the quarks and gluons were slightly different, would atoms still have formed that were slightly different to how they actually are, but still recognisable atoms, or would there be a universe full of something else entirely ?
Re:Why did the soup make atoms ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because we live in a universe where its basic attributes are such that they allow that to happen.
so yeah... if they were slightly different these might be nothing of interest here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
relatedly,
some postulate that there are infinitely many universes and by "the anthropic principle" we happen to be in one that allows us to exist because by definition we couldn't be in any of the ones that are hostile to our existence. e.g. in universes where gravity is considerably weaker there's no stars or planets... and if there are no stars, then there isn't fusion which is what created all the elements beyond hydrogen (iirc), and therefore no chemistry, and no life, no evolution to increase complexity... etc
Re: (Score:2)
While the line of reasoning is sound, it's more or less a non-theory of exclusion.
Re: Why did the soup make atoms ? (Score:2)
Laws of physics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Laws of physics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
you end up with so many adjustable terms that your model could predict many things.
FTFY.
It seems wiser to identify what could be possible before claiming what is impossible.
Re: (Score:2)
We already have string theory for that:-)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly it should be called string toolbag. It contains some math that might (or might not) one day be useful in constructing a theory but it honestly has never actually been predictive enough to call it a theory.
There are measurement you can do to verify that. (Score:4, Informative)
That's a nice result (Score:3)
Lawn Guyland in the hizzouse! (Score:1)