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Science

Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma 264

Posted by timothy from the no-cataclysm-yet dept.
Martin writes "A series of presentations and a press conference was held today at Brookhaven National Laboratory about new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. The latest run was finished only a few weeks ago. The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter. The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL and in Japan and France, with the biggest cluster of about 1100 dual-CPU nodes located at the RHIC Computing Facility. It's nice to see that results are out so soon after the data were taken. There were previous stories about RHIC on /., here(1), here(2) and here(3)."
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Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma More

Closing In On The Quark-Gluon Plasma

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  • Recent events (Score:5, Informative)

    by mao che minh ( 611166 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:46PM (#6236784) Journal
    Here is a cool slideshow [uni-frankfurt.de] about the subject from 2000, when the theory was "complete speculation". And here is an article [sciencewatch.com] from Sciecne Watch that was written in 2001, when it was considered "somehwat speculative". There wasn't much news [iop.org] about it in 2002. And now, we have this story in 2003 [bnl.gov].

    Pretty cool.

    • Re:Recent events (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Karma whore!

      We want pictures - here is what RHIC looks like from above-

      http://www.agsrhichome.bnl.gov/Images/RHIC.jpg

  • Applications? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by krisp ( 59093 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:49PM (#6236812) Homepage
    Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research? How will it benifit mankind?

    • "Quark-Gluon Plasma" (Score:5, Funny)

      by GoofyBoy ( 44399 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:57PM (#6236871) Journal
      Give Star Trek writers a larger vocabulary.

      "Captian, it will take at least an hour to clean the quantum-transductor of all residual Quark-Gluon plasma!"

    • Applications ? Oh well... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by McSnarf ( 676600 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:58PM (#6236878)
      ...the most well-known example of pure science known to man is electricity. Why bother with something that can make frog's legs kick ?

      Experience has shown that "pure" research often leads to applications the researchers never imagined.

      Cutting research to areas with "immediate applicability" is quite in fashion in some circles. (The same circles, coincidentally, that do not usually do something for the benefit of mankind. Corporates come to mind.)

    • Re:Applications? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by The Only Druid ( 587299 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:59PM (#6236886)
      Offhand-

      This sort of physics is relevant to nanotechnology (and the subsequent issues of high-volume micromanufacture, etc.), as well as possibly energy resources (i.e. ZPF if that bears out, etc.).
      • Can I ask what your sig refers to ("Blizzard didn't invent the word, its a real religion.")? Just curious.
      • is sort of physics is relevant to nanotechnology (and the subsequent issues of high-volume micromanufacture, etc.)...

        The physics of things on small scales--yes, very useful for nanomaterials science. The physics of a quark-gluon plasma--not so useful for materials science. It takes multibillion-dollar instruments to make and detect these plasmas; they won't be finding their way into micromanufacturing for a looong time.

        I wouldn't be surprised if it is eventually useful. Almost all fundamental researc

    • Re:Applications? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ciroknight ( 601098 )
      It's likely we will never see the benifits of the research we do now. That's just how it seems to go. But in the 23rd century, it may be used to do just about anything........... ;) (Tachyons here we come...)

    • Weapons? (Score:3, Funny)

      by handy_vandal ( 606174 )
      ...what are the practicle applications for this research? How will it benifit mankind?

      More to the point -- what are the military applications?

    • Re:Applications? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:02PM (#6236916)
      i did my ph.d. in particle physics and this question gets asked many, many times. the typical answer from physicists would pull up something like a tv as an example - the electron tube developed by physicists is the basis for CRT... i don't, however, buy this notion. the easiest answer would be to say, all this is (almost) useless from practical point of view. it's purely for knowledge. anything practical that might come of fundamental research is a lucky by-product. to some people, knowledge is everything. to others, not so. while it may seem a bit unfair that the tax money is spent so "those who seek knowledge for the sake of it" can (it's more like a hobby to them...), i personally think it's for a novel cause.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Applications? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by confused one ( 671304 )
        So, you can honestly say that having a better understanding of, say for example, QCD isn't worth the effort? And you say you have a Ph.D in particle physics?

        I sincerely hope you're not teaching; because with an attitude like that, all of your students will be tainted with a distaste for advancing science.

    • Re:Applications? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Auckerman ( 223266 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:03PM (#6236923)
      Sometimes applications of knowledge are either completely nonobvious or impossible to do at the time of the discovery. This is something people need to accept. Much like GPS was impossible to do even after we understood relativity, we may not see the practical results of this or any other fundamental research well into this century.

      • Re:Applications? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by uberdave ( 526529 )
        GPS and Relativity? The two are unrelated as far as I know. Although satelite navigation relies on time beacons, relativistic effects due to the velocity of the satelites, or the gravitational field differences, should be insignificant and irrelevant. Please enlighten me.

        • Re:Applications? (Score:2, Informative)

          by Auckerman ( 223266 )
          The difference in the gravitational field of person and the satellites skews the GPS results somewhat. One needs to compensate for this to have a useable result for GPS.

        • Re:Applications? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by cens0r ( 655208 )
          Read this link [metaresearch.org] to answer your questions. To sum this up, the clocks in the satellites don't record the same time as those on earth, because of relativity.

          • Re:Applications? (Score:3, Informative)

            by Manic Ken ( 678260 )
            It's early (or late..)for me but this is not what I read:
            from the metaresearch link:

            2. What relativistic effects on GPS atomic clocks might be seen? General Relativity (GR) predicts that clocks in a stronger gravitational field will tick at a slower rate. Special Relativity (SR) predicts that moving clocks will appear to tick slower than non-moving ones. Remarkably, these two effects cancel each other for clocks located at sea level anywhere on Earth. So if a hypothetical clock at Earth

            • Re:Applications? (Score:3, Interesting)

              by Idarubicin ( 579475 )
              What I read from that is that the clocks on the satellites operate with a slightly redefined notion of a 'second' to compensate for the effects of relativity. Further, for clocks on Earth's surface at sea level, the effects of special and general relativity coincidentally cancel, so that a clock at the pole will seem to run at the same rate as one on the equator. Fair enough, it means that everybody's second seems to be the same length, to an observer at sea level on the earth.

              Nevertheless, someone had

        • I believe that there are tables of special and general relatavistic corrections applied in GPS calculations. Otherwise you get errors in position on the order of 100-200 metres.
    • > what are the practicle applications for this research?
      > How will it benifit mankind?

      Same way as the discovery and learning about the electron and the proton and the photon and the quark...

      How all of those benifited mankind I'll leave for you to look into :)

    • Re:Applications? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bootsy Collins ( 549938 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:21PM (#6237079)

      Recreating something that existed at the time of the formation of the universe is facinating and all, but , what are the practicle applications for this research?

      Need it have a "practical application"?

      How will it benifit mankind?

      Well, that's a very different question.

      I don't think this will have any practical value, per se. Absolutely zero. Oh, it's possible that down the road someone much cleverer than I will come up with something. In fact, that's the normal way in which major technological advances have occurred. For instance, when Schottky began studying the quantum behavior of transition metals, he wasn't interested in the tiniest bit in any sort of practical application; he just wanted to understand the implications of quantum mechanics for electrons inside certain solids. If you had asked at the time, "what's the practical benefit of this work?" the answer would have been "zippo." And yet pretty much all of modern technology is based upon the transisitor that was so discovered. That's the way it's always been. Michael Faraday didn't really see any public benefit to understanding electromagnetism, either. Pure research has historically been without such obvious benefit.

      But nevertheless, I don't want to suggest that that's the eventual result here, because I don't believe it will be. I think that would be disingenuous of me. I highly doubt that an improved understanding of the history of the Universe from the Big Bang to the present will ever produce any wonderful and amazing technological advance. To me, the motivation is simply that understanding and knowledge -- especially of something like how the Universe got to be the way it is, and why it works the way it does -- is inherently a good thing. It has value by definition. Perhaps my least favorite thing about our society is that we are trained to evaluate the worth of things in terms of their economic value. Just like love, understanding has its own value, in my mind -- bereft of any "practical" value.

      Let me give you an example of what I mean. To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star. Only elements as heavy as carbon or lighter can be formed in the early universe; for heavier elements, you need a star. Now, if you didn't already know this, stop and think about it for a second. A huge chunk of you, perhaps all of you, was inside a star at one time. It appears that you and I are star debris. And it gets even better. The way that large amounts of these elements, forged within a star, can get out of the star is if the star supernovas -- dies at the end of its lifetime with a big boom. That big boom also serves to make very heavy elements -- such as uranium, for instance -- that cannot be made even in a star while it's burning away. There's uranium, and other similar very heavy elements, on our planet. Do you see what I'm getting at? Much of the atoms that make all of us up, that make this planet up, were at one time inside a star (or stars) that lived its life, supernovaed, and spewed out its stellar debris with heavy elements. Eventually, maybe a few hundred million years later, that stuff is part of our planet, part of our atmosphere, our water, part of you and me. We are all brothers and sisters; we all came from the same place, sorta.

      Now, that knowledge will never make me any money. It will never have any practical benefit in my life. And yet, I consider myself immensely richer for knowing it.

      Understanding has its own value.

      • Now, that was a post.

        Mod parent up, please.
      • Best post I've read all year. Kudos Bootsy.
      • Understanding has its own value.

        Yet another example of "geek words to live by." :)

      • Re:Applications? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ErfC ( 127418 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @05:45PM (#6237866) Homepage
        Hear, hear! (Here, here? I can never remember.)

        Richard Feynmann also put it well:

        Science is like sex: occasionally something useful comes out of it, but that's not why we do it.

      • Not exactly (Score:3, Interesting)

        by MickLinux ( 579158 )
        To the best of our ability to tell, there's only one place where elements heavier than carbon (such as nitrogen, oxygen, sodium, etc. etc.) can be formed in large amounts -- and that's inside a star.

        I don't have a lot [hawaii.edu] other than my (very faulty) memory to back this up, but I seem to remember a Scientific American article that most of our heavy elements were formed in the shock waves of supernovas of the first round of stars. Not only that, but the progress of the supernova shock wave creates large clump
    • This research will be absolutely essential when we set about to create our own universes!
    • What single thing that makes mankind unique is that we ask questions. We wonder why things are the way they are. We want to know what came before us and what will follow after us. We want to know, well, EVERYTHING!

      Why does any answer have to have a practical application? Stop trying to make everything around you serve your will. Take some time to enjoy and examine the magisty, the wonder, the terrible beauty that is the universe we live in.

  • Scary Thought (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mgcsinc ( 681597 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#6236817)
    I know it's provincial, but there's just something scary about the thought of harnessing something, and I quote, "1,000,000,000,000 degrees" in temperature on earth...
    • Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Rankine?
      • Celsius, Fahrenheit, Kelvin, or Rankine?
        At 1e12, it wouldn't much matter.

        • Re:Scary Thought (Score:5, Insightful)

          by localghost ( 659616 ) <dleblanc@gmail.com> on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:12PM (#6237006)
          1e12ÂF is 5.56e11ÂC. 1e12ÂC is 1.8e12ÂF. While any of those numbers could be accurately described as "fucking HOT", it still makes a difference. Whether it starts at absolute 0, or 273ÂK above 0 probably doesn't make any difference at this order of magnitude, though.
          • 1e12ÂF is 5.56e11ÂC. 1e12ÂC is 1.8e12ÂF. While any of those numbers could be accurately described as "fucking HOT", it still makes a difference.

            That difference is false accuracy, because we are only dealing with one significant digit in 10^12 degrees.

            In other words, it is no point in discussing differences of a factor of 2 when we only have information accurate to a factor of 10.

            Tor
            • Whoever wrote that article is obviously not a scientist, because there are no units, and it's not in scientific notation. They're unlikely to care about significant digits. For all we know, the number as it was measured might have been 1.00000000000000000e12. Nobody writing an article would print that, though, so any information about how precise that number is has been lost.
    • The heat and pressure isn't actually harnested, we generate it by slamming two gold molecules together at a really high, relevistic speed. The idea is that we don't have to make high temperatures or pressures, but instead, have the molecules do it for us by colliding.

    • Not really (Score:5, Interesting)

      by f97tosc ( 578893 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:40PM (#6237217)
      Because it is only a few atoms that have this high temperature. 10 atoms that are 10^12 degrees hotter than the environment can heat up the 10^13 surrounding atoms by one degree. That is, it is enough energy to heat up one nanogram of material one degree. I would not sleep over it.

      This is of course a very rough calculation, but the point is that we are not so much dealing with enormous energies as with moderate energies concentrated to extremely small matter. They are not going to blow something big up.

      Tor

  • Gluons? (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#6236819) Homepage Journal

    I've heard of strap-ons, wouldn't a gluon hurt when removed?

  • disappointing (Score:4, Funny)

    by Boromir son of Faram ( 645464 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:50PM (#6236820) Homepage
    I was all excited about this at first, but it turns out that it's just a milestone in the search for quark-gluon plasma. I guess I'll have to put up with plain old photon-muon plasma for a couple more years.
    • âThe scientists are not yet ready to claim the discovery of the quark-gluon plasma, however. That must await corroborating experiments, now under way at RHICâ

      The Large Hadron Collider will hopefully be powerful enough to extend the Standard Model and get direct evidence of the Higgs boson as well.

  • BNL (Score:5, Funny)

    by das_katz_socrates ( 641745 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @03:51PM (#6236829) Homepage
    "The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL..."

    Who would've thought that the musical group Bare Naked Ladies ran linux.
  • Could someone please add the word "beowolf" to the friggin' lameness filter?

  • Also reported in Physics News Update 642 (Score:3, Informative)

    by prestidigital ( 341064 ) * on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:00PM (#6236891) Journal
    I don't know what half this stuff means. But I think it's cool that someone else does.

    Here's the body of the email update:

    INTRIGUING ODDITIES IN HIGH-ENERGY NUCLEAR COLLISIONS. Missing
    debris in the smashup between gold nuclei going at close to the
    speed of light suggests the creation of a highly unusual plasma
    environment, researchers have announced at Brookhaven National
    Laboratory. By smashing together gold ions at Brookhaven's
    Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), scientists are attempting to
    make and study a state of matter that existed only millionths of a
    second after the big bang. Called a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), it is
    a hot, dense soup of individual quarks and gluons. In today's
    universe, by contrast, quarks come in groups of twos and threes,
    held together by gluons. This spring, Brookhaven researchers
    performed a "control" experiment, in which they collided a gold
    nucleus with a deuteron, a light nucleus consisting of just a proton
    and neutron. In these and other kinds of nuclear collisions, a pair
    of quarks from a proton or neutron occasionally gets ejected. In
    turn each ejected quark produces a stream or "jet" of particles in
    its wake. In some of the gold-deuteron collisions, the researchers
    indeed observed pairs of jets flying in opposite directions. But in
    head-to-head collisions between two gold nuclei, researchers
    observed only one, rather than two, jets. This property, called jet
    quenching, suggests that the particle jet traveling in the direction
    of the collision region is getting absorbed by a hot, dense state of
    matter. Jet quenching is predicted to occur in the correspondingly
    hot, dense environment of a quark-gluon plasma, but RHIC
    experimentalists are not ready to claim the QGP prize quite yet. To
    verify its presence and rule out rival scenarios, they are planning
    numerous other experiments for finding other signatures of a QGP.
    However, the new data has convinced Columbia theorist Miklos
    Gyulassy that the RHIC team is already seeing a QGP (see
    http://www-cunuke.phys.columbia.edu/people/g yulass y/Welcome.html).
    The gold-gold collisions, he and his colleagues calculate, produce
    an environment 100 times denser than ordinary nuclear matter and
    display properties predicted in QGP models based on quantum
    chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of the strong force which holds
    nuclei together. On June 18, three of the four RHIC experimental
    groups have submitted papers on the new results to Physical Review
    Letters and researchers discussed these new results at a special
    Brookhaven colloquium today. (Brookhaven press release, June 11,
    http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/pubaf/pr/2003/bnlpr 06110 3.htm.)

  • Units? (Score:4, Funny)

    by wcspxyx ( 120207 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:02PM (#6236908)
    From the article:

    The top, purple band is the realm where QGP can exist, at very high temperatures above 1,000,000,000,000 degrees.

    Is that in Celsius or Fahrenheit?

    • Re:Units? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Abcd1234 ( 188840 )
      Given they're physicists, methinks it's in Kelvins.

    • Re:Units? (Score:2, Funny)

      by red floyd ( 220712 )
      <DAVE-BARRY>
      "Top Purple Band" would be a good name for a rock band.
      </DAVE-BARRY>
    • Since they only give one significant digit it does not matter, as

      10^12 C ~= 10^12 K ~= 10^12 F

      The differ by less than a factor 2, which is insignificant when you only have accuracy to a factor of 10.

      (On the other hand, it is from physics so it is probably Kelvin).

      Tor

  • 1100 dual-CPU nodes... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I think I've just discovered the root cause for global warming...

  • Coolest name for matter ever! (Score:5, Informative)

    by foo fighter ( 151863 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:09PM (#6236974) Homepage
    I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

    On a slightly more serious note...

    The article links to a helpful physics primer [bnl.gov] if you, like me, need a little help understanding subatomic physics. (I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)

    A little googling turned up this awesome page on subatomic particles called The Particle Adventure [particleadventure.org]. This is the most accessible physics lesson I've ever received. Awesome.

    This is the most fun I've ever had with subatomic physics: Quark Dance [quarkdance.org]!

    • I'm going to name my band "Quark-Gluon Plasma". All my fans will call it "QGP" for short. It's much cooler than "Bose-Einstein Condensate".

      No, the whole point is QGP is much much HOTTER than a BEC.....

      So you won't be a cool band, you'll be a hot band.

      Steve
    • If you really want to read a funny book on physics, I recomend The God Particle by Leon Lederman. It is written by an experimentational physicist, not a theoretical physicist, and is the greatest book on physics. It goes through an entire history of physics, from Democritus of Abdera from ancient Greece, who first hypothecized that everything was made of a-toms (Lederman's spelling for really uncuttable things, not chemical atoms), to modern day (~1993) with the Fermilab particle accelerator. Everything
    • "(I'm just have a lowly Math degree.)"

      Still working on the English degree, hmm? :)

    • Band title.. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by efuseekay ( 138418 )
      hehehe, we physics students have a nice time thinking about band names from physics jargon. OUr favourite is still "The Naked Singularity."

      Btw, the naked singularity is a concept from general relativity : it is the point in spacetime where Einstein's equation blows up and makes no sense. All blackholes, mathematically, have singularities in the middle, but they are "hidden" behind the event horizon, so a guy who fall into the blackhole may see the singularity, but will never get out to tell his friends out

  • Actually... (Score:5, Funny)

    by blamanj ( 253811 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:10PM (#6236985)
    The results are a new milestone in the search for the Quark-Gluon Plasma, a new state of nuclear matter.

    ...it's a 13.7 billion year old state of matter.
  • "When two gold nuclei collide head-on, the temperatures reached are so extreme (more than 300 million times the surface temperature of the sun) that the individual protons and neutrons inside the merged gold nuclei are expected to melt...


    Doesn't AMD hold a patent on this?

  • Basic Introduction (Score:3, Informative)

    by HughJampton ( 659996 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:20PM (#6237060)
    Here's a decent Nature article on QGP http://www.nature.com/nsu/000217/000217-5.html [nature.com]

  • Those damn humans! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikeophile ( 647318 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:22PM (#6237093)
    This is from a report Brookhaven made to define the possible dangers of the RHIC. Oddly, the site seems to be down now. Black holes and stable negatively charged strangelets, while cool ways to snuff the world, don't hold a candle to this one. the report [bnl.gov]
    This is an exotic possibility of which the report states that "Physicists have grown quite accustomed to the idea that empty space  what we ordinarily call 'vacuum'  is in reality a highly structured medium, that can exist in various states or phases, roughly analogous to the liquid or solid phases of water. . . . Although certainly nothing in our existing knowledge of the laws of Nature demands it, several physicists have speculated on the possibility that our contemporary 'vacuum' is only metastable, and that a sufficiently violent disturbance might trigger its decay into something quite different. A transition of this kind would propagate outward from its source throughout the universe at the speed of light, and would be catastrophic."
    • Wow... sounds like the Genesis Effect from Star Trek II.

    • Re:Those damn humans! (Score:5, Informative)

      by confused one ( 671304 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @09:18PM (#6239240)
      You know, the reason the link was dead was because this was FUD generated by a few physicist claiming that RHIC could lead to the end of the world....

      It was discredited with the simple truthful statement that a neutrino interacting with matter in the Earth could potentially release more energy than RHIC could generate in it's lifetime. i.e. higher energy reactions than those generated at RHIC occur all the time, all around us; and, we're still here.

      of course, I'm paraphrasing a little...

  • -- The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters at BNL

    Which makes one wonder how long it is before we see Microsoft announce Windows XP Nuclear Collider Edition

  • Quark (Score:2, Funny)

    by eclectic4 ( 665330 )

    ...will this new "gluon plasma" be in version 7 then? And how long are we going to have to wait for it THIS time...?

  • Coverage on Ch. 12, Long Island's News Station (Score:5, Funny)

    by StefanJ ( 88986 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @04:58PM (#6237353) Homepage Journal
    Interdimensional Gateway Opens in Suffolk County.

    Elder Gods awake from aeons of slumber.

    Film at Eleven.

  • Requisite SCO Bashing Humor Post (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Wednesday June 18, 2003 @07:10PM (#6238448)
    The data were analyzed on large Linux clusters

    SCO adds the entire branch of physics to their lawsuit maintaining that all discoveries made with Linux software belong to them.

    Their suit against God for creating a world where Linux IP was infringed is on hold while they attempt to hire Dilbert as their process server.

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