|
Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collisions
Contact:
Dr Peter Jones
Nuclear Physics Group
School of Physics & Astronomy
The
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston, Birmingham
B15 2TT, United Kingdom
Email: informatics-crn-enquiries[at]cs.bham.ac.uk
Website: http://www.np.ph.bham.ac.uk/research/heavyions.htm
Members of the Nuclear Physics group are collaborating on an international project designed to
recreate a state of matter that theorists believe would have existed during
the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The experiment involves
colliding together gold nuclei at very high energies in an attempt to
raise the temperature of matter above a million million degrees Kelvin,
or 150,000 times the temperature at the centre of the Sun. At these temperatures,
protons and neutrons are expected to melt forming a new state of matter
known as the quark-gluon plasma. Quarks are one of the fundamental building
blocks of matter and gluons are force particles that under normal conditions
bind quarks into protons and neutrons.
This research is undertaken
at the Brookhaven National Laboratory using the world’s first collider
of heavy nuclei: the Relativistic Heavy
Ion Collider (RHIC). Birmingham is a member of the STAR
collaboration and is the only UK participant at this new facility.
Each head-on collision
of two gold nuclei produces several thousand particles. From the type
and distribution of these particles we are able to deduce the properties
of the state of matter that has been produced. Early indications have
shown that the matter
produced in these collisions behaves like an almost perfect fluid, contrary
to initial expectations that it should behave more like a gas.
|
