Scientists Are Creating Plasma So Hot, It May Melt the Rules of Reality
CERN's Large Hadron Collider will soon be smashing oxygen and neon atoms into other atoms of their own kind as part of its ATLAS experiment.
The collisions will happen under enough heat and pressure to melt protons and neutrons and release their components (quarks and gluons), creating quark-gluon plasma.
Quark-gluon plasma was thought to have emerged during the Big Bang, and could tell us more about conditions in the nascent universe.
Even the most powerful telescopes have not yet been able to see far enough back in time to witness events from the Big Bang. But by smashing atoms, it is possible to create a plasma that existed right after the universe was born.
As part of CERN's ATLAS experiment, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is now crashing oxygen ions into each other, and will soon be doing the same with neon ions. Heavy ions like this can create the quark-gluon plasma that is thought to have existed when the universe first exploded into being.
During those very early moments of the universe, things were extraordinarily hot, and quark-gluon plasma behaves in strange ways when super-heated. This is because high temperatures will bring on changes in the strong force—one of the three forces in the Standard Model of Particle Physics that is impossible to break down any further.
The strong force holds subatomic particles together—protons and neutrons stay in one piece because the quarks they are made of are held in place by the strong force, (which in turn keeps protons and neutrons themselves together to form the nucleus of an atom). This critical force is propagated by fundamental particles known as gluons, which are both massless units of energy that have no electric charge and bosons, which spin in full integer values (as opposed to fermions which have odd half-integer spins). Because quarks and gluons are held together so tightly by the strong force, the only way to release them is turning up the temperature and density so high that it can actually melt the protons and neutrons they make up, creating quark-gluon plasma.
CERN is colliding oxygen ions with each other—and repeating the process with neon ions—because they have far fewer protons and neutrons than the lead ions which are usually smashed to create this plasma. This means that oxygen and neon will produce smaller blobs of quark-gluon plasma that could possibly reveal what happens somewhere between collisions of lighter particles (such as protons) in 'cold' conditions and heavier particles (such as lead ions) in immensely hot and dense conditions.
CERN researchers are eagerly hoping to observe some specific potential phenomena during these tests. Jet quenching, for one, occurs when highly energetic particle jets begin to lose energy as they zoom through quark-gluon plasma. (It has been observed with xenon and iron ions before, but never with oxygen or neon ions.) If what theories have predicted actually happens, the results of the ATLAS experiment might show how dense quark-gluon plasma needs to get for jet quenching to begin. The tests could also provide more insight into conditions needed for the plasma to form, opening a proverbial a portal 14 billion years back in time to what conditions were like in the wake of the Big Bang.
The tests could even give researchers new information on the showers of particles produced by subatomic particles of cosmic origin, which run into the oxygen and nitrogen atoms in Earth's atmosphere. There are still many unknowns present in these interactions, colliding protons with oxygen ions could recreating the situations in a way that scientists could analyze up close and personal.
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