The universe's primordial soup flowing at CERN
Researchers have recreated the universe's primordial soup in miniature format by colliding lead atoms with extremely high energy in the 27 km long particle accelerator, the LHC at CERN in Geneva. The primordial soup is a so-called quark-gluon plasma and researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have measured its liquid properties with great accuracy at the LHC's top energy. The results have been submitted to Physical Review Letters.
A few billionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was made up of a kind of extremely hot and dense primordial soup of the most fundamental particles, especially quarks and gluons. This state is called quark-gluon plasma. By colliding lead nuclei at a record-high energy of 5.02 TeV in the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the 27 km long Large Hadron Collider, LHC at CERN in Geneva, it has been possible to recreate this state in the ALICE experiment's detector and measure its properties.
"The analyses of the collisions make it possible, for the first time, to measure the precise characteristics of a quark-gluon plasma at the highest energy ever and to determine how it flows," explains You Zhou, who is a postdoc in the ALICE research group at the Niels Bohr Institute. You Zhou, together with a small, fast-working team of international collaboration partners, led the analysis of the new data and measured how the quark-gluon plasma flows and fluctuates after it is formed by the collisions between lead ions.
Advanced methods of measurement
The focus has been on the quark-gluon plasma's collective properties, which show that this state of matter behaves more like a liquid than a gas, even at the very highest energy densities. The new measurements, which uses new methods to study the correlation between many particles, make it possible to determine the viscosity of this exotic fluid with great precision.
You Zhou explains that the experimental method is very advanced and is based on the fact that when two spherical atomic nuclei are shot at each other and hit each other a bit off center, a quark-gluon plasma is formed with a slightly elongated shape somewhat like an American football. This means that the pressure difference between the centre of this extremely hot 'droplet' and the surface varies along the different axes. The pressure differential drives the expansion and flow and consequently one can measure a characteristic variation in the number of particles produced in the collisions as a function of the angle.
Mapping the primordial soup
"It is remarkable that we are able to carry out such detailed measurements on a drop of 'early universe', that only has a radius of about one millionth of a billionth of a meter. The results are fully consistent with the physical laws of hydrodynamics, i.e. the theory of flowing liquids and it shows that the quark-gluon plasma behaves like a fluid. It is however a very special liquid, as it does not consist of molecules like water, but of the fundamental particles quarks and gluons," explains Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje, professor and head of the ALICE group at the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje adds that they are now in the process of mapping this state with ever increasing precision—and even further back in time.
Explore further
User comments
Where is the Search ? Where lies origins- what use of misleads ??
Your info: New results about the primordial universe from CERN experiments
Mapping the primordial soup-It is remarkable that we are able to carry out such detailed measurements on a drop of 'early universe', that only has a radius of about one millionth of a billionth of a meter.
I admit to finding it extremely humorous that this particular pattern is showing up at multiple scales, up to galactic and even galactic cluster scale, we find the same processes happening. I agree with Spider Robinson: God is an Iron!
Who thinks this s#it is right?
For a brief moment, as a pre-quark-gluon mass of plasma, referring to that 'droplet' as an analogue of the "primordial soup" is not such a far-off description. It is up to the creative theoretical physicists to posit what it would be before that.
OK meter stick passes by in 1 sec, its moving at a meter/sec. You run pass it and it takes 2 sec, so it moves at 0.5 Meter/sec. If it's a wavelet one meter long then its a space time wrinkle, get real!
But wait, in a cloud chamber?
But the neutron breaks into an electron and a proton and a neutrino. Fact is, when is the neutron stable within any field? Go figure, you can figure it out on your calculator. Only thing, fix the radius and the mass. Try only charge and no other assumptions. "Oops", he says, "What about these universal constants?" Answer: "Yea, what about it?"
Yea!
Yes, my wife, you? By the way she doesn't get it. Neither does any PhD. When at IBM I spoke to a theoretical physicist from Cornell, his reply, "There's not enough energy in it." Talking about gravity and the particles that make up a mass. I didn't get it. So just let it go. But you guys seem to eat this nonsense up. Maybe thinking for yourselves, but with what kind of attitude? Objective or subjective?
https://en.wikipe...8film%29
perhaps you need a second opinion (from a psychiatrist that doesn't have a personal vested interest or bias)?
Kidding right? Occam's razor?
Think the PhD response meant the lack of energy to show the relationship of protons and electrons of a mass as to how it effects gravity. Not sure you must have a syndrome i order to think clearly. I possibly the other way round.
Can't figure why all the support for something that's so hard to show empirically or mathematically. Every proof does nothing to show why i'm wrong and the status quo is correct. It's like saying something anti-religious is sacrilege, with no existence proof of the later! Other words a sin to differ. Oh, we are still fighting this one, also. There's something amiss. So even if you could create a theory that's correct by changing the shape of space and time within a mathematically continuous space it would still be able to transpose to a euclidean space. It's conceptual and works for all my engineering analysis, even gravity, ... https://onedrive....le%2cpdf
Please sign in to add a comment. Registration is free, and takes less than a minute. Read more