Hottest temperature ever heads science to Big Bang

Mon, Feb 15, 2010

Scientists have created the hottest temperature ever in the lab -- 4 trillion degrees Celsius -- hot enough to break matter down into the kind of soup that existed microseconds after the birth of the universe.

They used a giant atom smasher at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to knock gold ions together to make the ultra-hot explosions -- which lasted only for milliseconds. But that is enough to give physicists fodder for years of study that they hope will help them understand why and how the universe formed.

"That temperature is hot enough to melt protons and neutrons," Brookhaven's Steven Vigdor told a news conference at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Washington on Monday. These particles make up atoms, but they are themselves made up of smaller components called quarks and gluons.

What the physicists are looking for are tiny irregularities that can explain why matter clumped out of the primeval hot soup. They also hope to use their findings for more practical applications -- such as in the field of "spintronics" that aims to make smaller, faster and more powerful computing devices.

http://mGinger.com/index.jsp?inviteId=1334082

They used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC, pronounced "rick"), a particle accelerator and collider that is 2.4 mile (3.8 km) around and buried 12 feet (4 metres) underground in Upton, New York to collide gold ions billions of times.

BIRTH OF MATTER

Something happened in the milliseconds after the Big Bang to create an imbalance in favour of matter over anti-matter. If there had not been this disparity, matter and anti-matter would have simply reacted to create a universe of pure energy.

Later this year, physicists using the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland hope to smash lead ions together to create even hotter temperatures that should replicate moments even earlier in the birth of the universe. "The goal here is to create a device that can operate not only on the current of an electric charge but also on the current of spin," Kharzeev told the news conference. Quarks spin in different directions and understanding how and why they do this can help scientists harness the power.