Author: Robby Berman / Source: Big Think
- Scientists create droplets of quark gluon plasma.
- The droplets assume exactly the shapes researchers predicted.
- Far too hot to touch, but a fascinating glimpse at morsels of primordial soup.
For a few microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot a place for atoms’ constituent particles to hold together.
Instead, it’s believed that the first stuff that existed during those fleeting moments was a not-quite liquid quark gluon plasma, the “primordial soup” of the universe. Now, for the first time ever, scientists have created actual, super-hot droplets of this goo in the lab. “Our experimental result has brought us much closer to answering the question,” says lead researcher Jamie Nagle of University of Colorado Boulder, “of what is the smallest amount of early universe matter that can exist.” Nagle explained his work to CU Boulder Today.The PHENIX experiment
This look into the universes’ earliest matter was the mission of the PHENIX project, the results of which have been published in Nature Physics. Nagle and colleagues at Vanderbilt University created the droplets by smashing packets of protons and neutrons together in different combinations, resulting in temperatures in the millions of degrees Celsius. This took place within the massive Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY.
The scientists found that droplets were created which expanded to form three different…
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