Wednesday, April 20, 2005

Picking apart the 'Big Bang' brings a big mystery

This research report is intersting.

However, I am in the opinion that the "experiments generated a "perfect" liquid of Linked Particles, Instead of a Hot Gas of Indepent particles!!" May be an oversight!!

According to the Sutra that I read both from the Gotama Buddha & Tao Guru Lao Tze. Their explanations is that is the combustions of gases that created the "Big Exposions" then after the expolsion the Billions of Universes are formed.


From colliding atoms: Instead of a hot gas of independent particles, top, experiments generated a 'perfect' liquid of linked particles.
Brookhaven National Laboratory.


Picking apart the 'Big Bang' brings a big mystery
By Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

An atom-smashing fireball experiment has physicists puzzling over existing theories about the moments after the "Big Bang" that scientists say created the universe. Researchers conducted the experiment over the past three years at the Energy Department's Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, New York.

Thousands of collisions of gold atoms took place in the laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility. The goal was to create a charged gas that was more than 1 trillion degrees, up to 150,000 times hotter than the sun's core. This was the climate scientists believe followed the Big Bang.

Instead, the collisions created pinprick-size fireballs with matter that behaved like a high-temperature liquid, rather than a gas, for its infinitesimally brief existence, the team reported Monday.

"It's a big puzzle and a big surprise," Brookhaven's Dmitri Kharzeev says. The results were reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Tampa and are scheduled for publication in the journal Nuclear Physics A.

Physicists hope that by understanding the sometimes unexpected behavior of fundamental particles at very high temperatures, they can unravel rules of matter that govern all conditions.

Their Big Bang experiment was a collaboration by four teams of scientists and pooled results from separate particle-detecting experiments. Hundreds of researchers were involved.

Their earlier findings suggested that the atomic collisions created a primordial concoction known as "quark-gluon" plasma. But rather than behaving like a charged gas, or plasma, and moving about on independent paths, subatomic particles inside the collisions moved collectively in response to pressure variations, like liquids.

"The fact that they can extract from those collisions glimpses of how this matter behaves is a major success by itself," says physicist Hans Georg Ritter of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Quarks and gluons are the sub-particles inside protons and neutrons, which are the building blocks of atoms. Since the cool-down that followed the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, these subparticles are usually never seen liberated from protons and neutrons. They are bound inside these particles by strong atomic forces.

Trying to duplicate the moments that followed the Big Bang, the scientists used the high-powered collisions between heavy gold atoms to separate quarks and gluons from their proton and neutron containers. The scientists expected them to mingle as a continuous, charged gas, but that does not appear to have happened.

A few observers had expressed fears that the colliding atoms would create miniature versions of collapsed stars — tiny black holes that would consume Long Island, says Brookhaven's Sam Aronson. "But it's pretty clear that didn't happen."

Instead, the team is left with an intriguing discovery that they say will affect how physicists consider the first moments of the Big Bang. Kharzeev said physicists are still pondering how the early universe really developed if matter behaved as a liquid rather than a gas.

The post-collision particles acted like "perfect" liquids, which act almost uniformly in concert and dissipate heat very rapidly. Researchers are attempting to reconcile their findings with the behavior of the primordial fireball that lasted 380,000 years after the Big Bang.

In 2003, the WMAP satellite probe detected the signature of this fireball in the cosmic microwave background radiation that spans the entire sky.

Further, the discovery that the research team's collisions produced a perfect liquid rather than a gas is particularly intriguing, the researchers suggest, because it matches some aspects of string theory. This is an explanation of fundamental physics that treats physics particles as tiny strings instead of point-like objects and incorporates perfect liquids.

String theory aspires to become a "theory of everything" that unifies all forces of nature, says physicist Dam Thanh Son of the University of Washington, who was not on the discovery team. He said in an e-mail that the findings have not furthered this quest by string-theory proponents. But it could be that the results "will help us uncover a deep connection between the real world and string theory," he said. "That would be fantastic."

Despite the success of the experiments, cuts in Energy Department financing probably will reduce the program's operating time from 30 weeks to 12 weeks next year, Aronson says. "It will be a major hit on the productivity of the program, but we will continue."

USATODAY.com - Picking apart the 'Big Bang' brings a big mystery

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