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Other Topics Earth Science Scientists create hottest temperature in universe
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Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe. How hot is it? "That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor told a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington on Monday. These particles make up atoms, but they are themselves made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons. In comparison, "The predicted melting temperature of protons and neutrons is 2 trillion degrees. The temperatures at the core of a typical type-2 supernova is 2 billion degrees," he said. The center of our sun is 50 million degrees, iron melts at 1,800 degrees and the average temperature of the universe is now 0.7 of a degree above absolute zero. Hotter than supernova A team of scientists has created the hottest temperature matter ever measured in the universe – 4 trillion degree Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit), 2,50,000 times hotter than the centre of the sun. The team used Brookhaven’s giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, to ram charged gold particles into each other billions of times, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” with a temperature hotter than anything known in the universe, even supernova explosions They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), a particle accelerator and collider that is 2.4 mile around and buried 12 feet underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times. "RHIC was designed to create matter at temperatures first encountered in the early universe," Vigdor said. They calculate the 4 trillion degree temperature gets pretty close. They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed. A pioneering experiment The experiment is recreating the conditions of the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang. University of Colorado (CU) Boulder physics department Professors Jamie Nagle and Edward Kinney are collaborators on the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction experiment, or PHENIX, one of four large detectors that help physicists analyse the particle collisions using RHIC. A heavy ions collision PHENIX, which weighs 4,000 tons and has a dozen detector subsystems, sports three large steel magnets that produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths. RHIC is the only machine in the world capable of colliding so called “heavy ions” - atoms that have had their outer cloud of electrons stripped away. The research team used gold, one of the heaviest elements, for the experiment. From coolest to hottest The gold atoms were sent flying in opposite directions in RHIC, a 2.4-mile underground loop located in Upton, New York. The collisions melted protons and neutrons and liberated subatomic particles known as quarks and gluons. “It is very exciting that scientists at the University of Colorado are world leaders in laboratory studies of both the coldest atomic matter and now the hottest nuclear matter in the universe,” said Nagle, deputy spokesperson for the 500-person PHENIX team. Decoding 13.7 bn yrs history The new experiments with RHIC produced a temperature 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior. The collisions created miniscule bubbles heated to temperatures 40 times hotter than the interior of supernova. By studying the “soup” of subatomic particles created by the RHIC, researchers hope to gain insight into what occurred in the first microseconds after the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago, said Kinney. What the physicists are looking for are tiny irregularities that can explain why matter clumped out of the primeval hot soup. They also hope to use their findings for more practical applications -- such as in the field of "spintronics" that aims to make smaller, faster and more powerful computing devices. BIRTH OF MATTER Vigdor's team believe they are looking at a recreation of the moment just before the quark-gluon soup condensed into hadrons -- the particles of matter that make up most of our universe. Something happened in the milliseconds after the Big Bang to create an imbalance in favor of matter over anti-matter. If there had not been this disparity, matter and anti-matter would have simply reacted to create a universe of pure energy. Later this year, physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland hope to smash lead ions together to create even hotter temperatures that should replicate moments even earlier in the birth of the universe. Brookhaven has also patented some potential commercial applications of the research, said theorist Dmitri Kharzeev. "The goal here is to create a device that can operate not only on the current of an electric charge but also on the current of spin," Kharzeev told the news conference. Quarks spin in different directions and understanding how and why they do this can help scientists harness the power. It may be possible to replicate a symmetrical spin in graphene, for example, said Kharzeev. Graphene is a so-called nanomaterial that scientists believe may replace silicon in super-fast and super-small devices. "We are thinking of other practical applications as well," said Kharzeev. |
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