String Theory Explains RHIC Jet Suppression

Physics News Update ^ | Number 813 #2, February 27, 2006 | Phil Schewe, Ben Stein, and Davide Castelvecchi

[SunkenCiv]

String theory, the doubters say, makes no testable predictions. But this isn't exactly true... A few years ago string practitioners attempted to establish a relationship between the 10-dimensional string world and the 4-dimensional (3 spatial dimensions plus time) world in which we observe interactions among quark-filled particles like protons... This duality between string theory and the theory of the strong nuclear force, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), was recently used to interpret puzzling early results from [Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider] ... Two new papers by Hong Liu and Krishna Rajagopal of (MIT) and Urs Wiedemann (CERN) address this problem. The first paper calculates a specific quark-suppression parameter (namely, how much the quarks, each attached to a string dangling "downward" into a fifth dimension, are pushed around as they traverse the quark-gluon plasma) that agrees closely with the experimentally observed value. Rajagopal... says that in the second paper, the same authors make a specific testable prediction using string theory that bears not just on missing jets of energetic light quarks... but on the melting or dissociation temperatures of bound states of heavy quarks... moving through the quark-gluon plasma with sufficiently high velocity, as will be produced in future experiments at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) under construction at CERN.

[tet68]

The only way to create a more stable and dangerous black hole would be to compress more mass - a lot more mass. This is - and probably always will be - beyond our abilities here on Earth.

One can only hope so, however some where there is a scientist determined to try.

[SunkenCiv]

A Prediction from String Theory, with Strings Attached
By JR Minkel
March 02, 2007
http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=1475A684-E7F2-99DF-355B95296BE6031C

"If confirmed, however, the prediction would not offer evidence for string theory, which requires the existence of extra dimensions of space full of higher-dimensional stringlike objects and other widgets. Instead, it would establish that some of string theory's mathematics could be used to study the forces at work inside an atom's nucleus."