Posted on 03/04/2010 11:47:09 AM PST by decimon
A worldwide team of researchers, including 10 from Texas A&M University, have for the first time created a particle that is believed to have been in existence immediately after the creation of the universe – the so-called "Big Bang" – and it could lead to new questions and answers about some of the basic laws of physics because in essence, it creates a new form of matter.
Researchers Carl Gagliardi, Saskia Mioduszewski, Robert Tribble, Matthew Cervantes, Rory Clarke, Martin Codrington, Pibero Djawotho, James Drachenberg, Ahmed Hamed and Liaoyuan Huo, all affiliated with the Texas A&M Cyclotron Institute, along with numerous researchers from universities and labs all over the world, have created the anti-hypertriton – a never-before-seen particle – by colliding gold nuclei at extremely high speeds. Their work is published in the current issue of Science Express.
Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., the team used particles of gold and collided them just short of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). More than 100 million collisions were made to collect the data.
"We know that some new particles of matter were formed immediately after the Big Bang, but they were gone within a millionth of a second or so," explains Gagliardi.
"By accelerating the gold (gold was selected because it is very heavy) at extremely high speeds, we were able to replicate the conditions right after the Big Bang. It's very much like when two cars collide at high speeds – you would have a lot of hot metal.
"At a temperature of about two trillion degrees, which is about 100,000 times hotter than the surface of the sun, we were able to produce a new form of matter."
As this new form of matter evolves, it expands and cools and eventually decays. When it does so, the majority of it converts back into ordinary matter, but a large amount converts into anti-matter instead, Gagliardi points out.
"This enables us to see things we have never seen before," Gagliardi adds.
"We found evidence of particles called anti-lambdas bound within the anti-nuclei. The anti-lambda has a lifetime of less than one-billionth of a second, which on a nuclear time scale, is actually a long amount of time. It gives us a framework to make sort of a 3D periodic table of the elements, from matter to anti-matter. This now gives us a new class of matter to study, one we think should be a mirror image of our world. But a big question is, how accurate is that mirror?"
Gagliardi says it's been known that the Big Bang made equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, but over time, something has tripped the balance for life to exist – there is more matter today than anti-matter.
"So why is this?" he asks.
"We may be able to answer these questions in the future."
Mioduszewski adds, "These new findings give us a large new source of hypernuclei. They provide us with a new way to study the forces that act inside atomic nuclei, and might teach us about the forces that act in the center of the neutron stars.
"This has opened up a very big door for us."
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About research at Texas A&M University: As one of the world's leading research institutions, Texas A&M is in the vanguard in making significant contributions to the storehouse of knowledge, including that of science and technology. Research conducted at Texas A&M represents an annual investment of more than $582 million, which ranks third nationally for universities without a medical school, and underwrites approximately 3,500 sponsored projects. That research creates new knowledge that provides basic, fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state, nation and world.
Contact: Keith Randall, News & Information Services, at (979) 845-4644 or keith-randall@tamu.edu or Carl Gagliardi at (979) 845-1411 or c-gagliardi@tamu.edu
For more news about Texas A&M University, go to http://tamunews.tamu.edu.
Follow us on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/tamutalk.
And it was really weird then.
When I was a physics student, aeons ago, we had a t-shirt printed with Maxwell’s Equations in differential form. “And God said: [Maxwell’s Equations], and there was Light”.
Not to judge physics too harshly, but they always say they are describing how the universe was created, but then only demonstrate theories that show how matter can take different forms under different conditions. The question of how the universe was created would explain how something can be created out of nothing. I know this is beyond their paygrade, but would hope that they would constrain their language to precisely what it is they are discovering or theorizing on; how matter took its position and form within the universe, not how matter was created. No one has any idea how that was accomplished. Some say it was a miracle. I tend to agree.
how close was this to an Al Gore (tm) brand Surface Temperature Monitoring Station?
This is expensive science with no practical app;ication.
The same reason we shouldn’t have gone to the moon in the 60’s, right? No practical reason, so why do it.
Oh, you mean we ended up finding all sorts of practical applications of the knowledge we obtained?
Nevermind.
Didn’t you do this experiment in your backyard using grapefruits and shotguns or something?
There were many practical reasons why we should have gone to the Moon. If the US is to remain pre eminent in space we need an active space exploration program. Think battle stations in space with particle beam weapons. When the first operational battle station comes over the horizon, it better have the stars and stripes on it or the world will be cast into a dark age of at least 10.000 years.
The same reason we shouldn’t have gone to the moon in the 60’s, right? No practical reason, so why do it.
The practical reason for going to the moon was to secure our prieminence in space; or short answer, to command the high ground. The moon landing was mostly for show, but the space program is and always will be to own the commanding heights. Its all about winning wars.
Actually there is always a practical reason for manned exploration of whatever frontier there is. The nature of human life demands this.
In the beginning...
the anti-hypertriton – a never-before-seen particle – by colliding gold nuclei at extremely high speeds... Using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, N.Y., the team used particles of gold and collided them just short of the speed of light (186,000 miles per second). More than 100 million collisions were made to collect the data.Yes, that's right -- using a facility right here in the United States, and not some third rate overpriced monster magnet buried under some village in Europe. ;') Thanks decimon. I think this is a repeat topic, but really who's gonna be able to tell? ;')
I thought this was an article about Phoenix in July.
No, it's not from The Onion.
Onion.
wHY did they use gold?
I remeber that T-shirt! ... Do you recall the one that had a cow standing in clover chewing its cud, thinking of the equation for escape velocity per gram from Earth Gravity.
"RHIC is the first machine in the world capable of colliding heavy ions, which are atoms which have had their outer cloud of electrons removed. RHIC primarily uses ions of gold, one of the heaviest common elements, because its nucleus is densely packed with particles."
I find that explanation somewhat lacking ... I can make some inferences from it, but that's all that they are.
I thought it was the mullet.
“RHIC is the first machine in the world capable of colliding heavy ions, which are atoms which have had their outer cloud of electrons removed. RHIC primarily uses ions of gold, one of the heaviest common elements, because its nucleus is densely packed with particles.”
I find that explanation somewhat lacking ... I can make some inferences from it, but that’s all that they are.
Thanks. Something is something.
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