* Astronomy

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RE: Quark-gluon plasma

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Title: Towards the Little Bang Standard Model
Authors: Ulrich W. Heinz (Ohio State University)

I review recent progress in developing a complete dynamical model for the evolution of the Little Bang fireballs created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions, and using the model to extract the transport properties and initial density fluctuations of the liquid quark-gluon plasma state of matter of which makes up these Little Bangs during the first half of their lives.

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LHC experiments bring new insight into matter of the primordial universe

Experiments using heavy ions at CERN1's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe. They will present their latest results at the Quark Matter 2012 conference, which starts today in Washington DC. The new findings are based mainly on the four-week LHC run with lead ions in 2011, during which the experiments collected 20 times more data than in 2010.
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Brewing the World's Hottest Guinness

Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) smashes particles together to recreate the incredible conditions that only existed at the dawn of time. The 2.4-mile underground atomic "racetrack" at RHIC produces fundamental insights about the laws underlying all visible matter. But along the way, its particles also smashed a world record.
Guinness World Records, no longer encumbered by "book of," recognised Brookhaven Lab for achieving the "Highest Man-Made Temperature."
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Hot Quark Soup Produced at RHIC

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An Icy Gaze into the Big Bang

Scientists have reached a milestone in the exploration of quantum gas mixtures. The group led by Rudolf Grimm has succeeded in producing controlled strong interactions between two fermionic elements. This model system not only promises to provide new insights into solid-state physics but also shows intriguing analogies to the primordial substance right after the Big Bang.
According to theory, the whole universe consisted of quark-gluon plasma in the first split seconds after the Big Bang. On the earth this cosmic primordial "soup" can be observed in big particle accelerators when, for example, the nuclei of lead atoms are accelerated to nearly the speed of light and smashed into each other, which results in particle showers that are investigated with detectors. Now the group of quantum physicists led by Prof. Rudolf Grimm and PhD Florian Schreck from the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences together with Italian and Australian researchers has for the first time achieved strong controlled interactions between clouds of lithium-6 and potassium-40 atoms. Hence, they have established a model system that behaves in a similar way as the quark-gluon plasma, whose energy scale has a twenty times higher order of magnitude.
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Universe evolved from a super-hot liquid

An experiment to recreate the conditions of Big Bang has suggested that the universe was a super-hot liquid in the moments immediately after its birth.
The results of the experiment have surprised physicists as they contradict the accepted view of what happened in the immediate aftermath of the creation of the universe - that the Big Bang threw out a superheated gas that clumped together to form matter.
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Hot stuff: Quark-gluon-plasma explained by black-hole-physics

Invited by theoretical physicists from the Vienna University of Technology, leading scientists in particle physics and string theory are gathering in a conference at the Erwin-Schrödinger Institute in Vienna, aiming to understand the inner workings of our world at its deepest levels.
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Explained: Quark gluon plasma

For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe consisted of a hot soup of elementary particles called quarks and gluons. A few microseconds later, those particles began cooling to form protons and neutrons, the building blocks of matter.
Over the past decade, physicists around the world have been trying to re-create that soup, known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP), by slamming together nuclei of atoms with enough energy to produce trillion-degree temperatures.
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What does the hottest matter ever made sound like?

The lab-made material was created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York. The particle smasher slams gold ions together, breaking the atoms and their constituent protons and neutrons into even smaller bits called quarks and gluons.
The resulting fireball - called a quark-gluon plasma - is trillions of degrees and mimics conditions when the universe was a millionth of a second old. As the fireball created in this "little bang" cools, the individual quarks and gluons combine into a zoo of larger particles.
Physicist Ágnes Mócsy of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, and colleagues have calculated what this fireball of quarks and gluons would sound like to an observer embedded within it.
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What does the hottest matter ever made sound like?

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Physicists have measured the temperature inside the hottest fireball on Earth, a four-trillion-degree soup of melted protons and neutrons, which could help explain why matter won over antimatter after the Big Bang.
According to a report in Nature News, this soup of subatomic particles was created in collisions of gold nuclei at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York.
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