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An international research team at CERN published a paper in Physical Review Letters in August reporting that they generated “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP) — the state matter is believed to have been in one-millionth of a second after the birth of the universe — by colliding nuclei of oxygen-16 and neon-20, both far lighter than lead. Until now, QGP was thought to form only from collisions of heavy nuclei like lead, but traces of fluid-like behavior were confirmed even with these lighter nuclei. On 5ch’s Science News+ thread, however, the discussion skipped past the experiment’s significance and jumped straight to standard-issue jokes like “Vegeta’s Big Bang Attack” and the horror urban legend “Fessenden’s Universe,” and things never got any deeper.
Scientists recreate a “tiny Big Bang,” closing in on the universe’s origins
Using a particle accelerator, researchers succeeded in producing an actual “soup” of the early universe from collisions of nuclei far smaller than previously used. These “mini Big Bangs” offer clues to what happened in the universe’s earliest moments.
Immediately after the Big Bang, matter did not exist in the form we know today.
Source: wired.jp / Original article here
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Background and key points on this topic
Experiments to generate QGP (quark-gluon plasma) have been a cornerstone of heavy-ion physics for decades at facilities like CERN’s LHC, and the standard approach has been to collide heavy nuclei with mass numbers around 200, such as lead or gold. The oxygen-16 and neon-20 used this time have mass numbers less than a tenth of lead’s — a size previously considered “too small to produce QGP.” The fact that signs of fluid-like collective motion showed up even in such a light system is an open question that could affect how physicists define the minimum system size needed to produce QGP, as well as how they interpret proton-proton collision data, which is normally treated as a baseline where QGP does not form. It’s worth clarifying, since the headline’s phrase “recreating the Big Bang” is easy to misread: this doesn’t mean recreating the universe itself, but reproducing in the lab a state of matter believed to have existed for a brief instant right after the universe’s birth. On the thread, standard-issue jokes took priority over scientific discussion, and the exchange never really dug into the experiment’s significance.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Science News+) thread “[Space] Scientists recreate a “tiny Big Bang,” closing in on the universe’s origins.”
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