In a microscopic demolition derby run on an oval the size of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, researchers are on track to recreate the conditions of the biggest bang there ever was.
But first, some practice runs are generating a few surprises.
For the past year or so, researchers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York have been bringing together the naked nuclei of gold atoms in head-on collisions at near light-speed conditions, all in an attempt to mimic the first moments of the Big Bang when strange particles are theorized to have existed.
The most recent attempts, discussed earlier this week at a meeting of the American Physical Society, have created miniature explosions of particles that were 10 times more powerful than anything previously done in a lab.
But like running up on a tire in an open-wheel Indy race, it all happened so fast. In fact, the brief events didn't even register on the Brookhaven researchers' high-tech clock.
"We expected the particles to be released for a much longer time at these high energies," said University of Washington physicist John G. Cramer. "Instead, the time is so short that we can't measure it. The time has grown shorter with increased energy instead of longer."
What they did find, however, were miniature fireballs that expanded at 60 percent the speed of light and created a blast wave of particles rushing outward. The meaning of all this is not yet known.
"What we're seeing is a very violent explosion that was not predicted by any of the theories," Cramer said.
The goal: Soup
Instead of a trophy and some milk (the spoils of an Indy win), Cramer and his colleagues are just trying to make soup -- quark and gluon soup. And though Cramer has two sci-fi novels to his credit -- Twistor and Einstein's Bridge -- we assure you this is all about real science.
It goes like this:
Quarks are particles theorized to have existed less than a millionth of a second after the birth of our universe, sometime between 12 and 15 billion years ago. You won't see any quarks lying around in your garage, of course. For one, they are beyond microscopically small. And also researchers think they are now hidden in packages of twos and threes, held together by gluons, the ultimate invisible Elmer's.
Big Bang theory puts it this way: As the universe aged and cooled, a plasma of quarks and gluons coalesced into protons and neutrons, then nuclei and finally atoms. Only then could molecules develop, setting the stage for places like Earth and perhaps the most bizarre result of all, life.
Researchers said that while the results of the initial crash tests are tantalizing, it's too early to say whether the proper soup, containing the quarks and gluons, has been concocted.
Smashing success
The collisions monitored by Cramer and more than 400 colleagues build on previous work at a similar laboratory in Switzerland, where researchers last year came close to creating a quark-gluon plasma by crashing one fast-moving lead ion into another one held stationary.
But Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is an underground demolition derby in the true sense. Two tunnels serve the racetracks, each 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) around, the same distance as the oval at Indy.
Gold is the destructible vehicle of choice because it is one of the heaviest common elements around, and so its nucleus is packed with particles. (Earlier this year, Brookhaven scientists announced they had used the collider to create the
ever achieved in a scientific experiment.)The Brookhaven machinery first generates gold ions -- the nuclei of gold atoms stripped of their outer cloud of electrons. The ions are sent racing in opposite directions around the two tracks, guided and accelerated to nearly 186,000 miles (299,000 kilometers) per second by more than 1,700 superconducting magnets.
Where the two rings cross, head-on collisions are inevitable. Temperatures reach incredible levels -- 100,000 times hotter than the core of the Sun.
Pushing the envelope
"We are trying to understand how things sorted themselves out just after the Big Bang, on the time scale of about a microsecond," Cramer said. "We are part of an intricate dance between theory and experiment, prediction, observation and revision of ideas, which always leads to greater knowledge and understanding."
And like any racecar driver will tell you, experiments that push the envelope of knowledge often produce results that were not part of the plan.
"It looks like we did that," Cramer said.
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