By COLLEEN CREAMER
for The Nashville City Paper
Scientists believe they have recreated matter that existed 14 billion years ago directly after the Big Bang. The recreation of what is called “quark-gluon plasma” may help scientists better understand fundamental properties of matter and the origins of the universe.
The research is nearing the final phases at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island and involves a collaborative effort with researchers at Vanderbilt University. In mid June, the team at Brookhaven held a national press conference announcing the results of the experiments.
“It [the news] had a very big impact. The experimentalists are a cautious bunch, and I am in that camp, too,” said associate professor of physics Victoria Green. Green and Vanderbilt professor of physics Charles Maguire are a part of the team of physicists working at the Brookhaven National Laboratory using a $600 million atom smasher called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).
The RHIC creates micro-explosions by slamming the nuclei of gold atoms together at nearly the speed of light. Green said other scientists in Geneva, Switzerland, claimed they had developed the plasma, but had to shut down before they could get adequate results. Maguire said June’s press conference was to state that the opponents of the lab’s theory and results had been disproved.
“Now almost everybody believes that this very interesting state of matter is being produced,” Maguire said. “We are not finally sure until we do another experiment, but the theorists are all saying, ‘You’ve done it. It’s just the experimentalists that are holding back and not willing to say it.’“
The Geneva team, according to Green, may have been right, but in the final analysis the group could not get enough proof and the consequent credibility.
“It’s possible that they were right, but if you can’t write a peer review paper and get that acceptance from the scientific community, then it doesn’t have the currency,” Green said.
The RHIC collaborators announced the early results in a series of papers last January in the journal Physical Review Letters. Green said when the universe exploded it began to cool and condense into stars and galaxies.
“In the Big Bang we believe that all space and matter were at a single point, and if you can imagine something very hot but is not contained in any way, then it will just expand just the same way when you take the top off a pot of boiling water,” Green said. “The steam expands.”
Maguire said looking into the nature of quark-gluon plasma will give the scientific community a better grasp of the nature of matter.
“It will give us a deeper understanding of the very basic components of matter,” said Maguire. “We are looking at matter in its most simplest form really. What we are doing is heating up ordinary matter and essentially melting it to its simpler components and these components go by these whimsical names called quarks and gluons.”
David Salisbury, a science reporter for Vanderbilt News Service, who is also a physicist, said when the universe was created, for a brief period it consisted of a blazing plasma made of a mixture of quarks and gluons.
“As the universe expanded and cooled, quarks and gluons were organized into various combinations to create protons, neutrons and a host of particles,” Salisbury said. “In this fashion, the familiar atomic structure of matter came into being.”
