A temperature not seen since the first microsecond of the birth of the universe has been recreated by scientists, and they discovered that the event did not unfold quite the way they expected. The interaction of energy, matter, and the strong nuclear force in the ultra-hot experiments conducted at t
he Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider was thought to be well understood. However, a detailed investigation has revealed that physicists are missing something in their model of how the universe works. A recent paper detailing the findings appears in the journal“It’s the things you weren’t expecting that are really trying to tell you something in science,” says Steven Manly, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester and co-author of the paper.
Particles in this hot-soup plasma stream out, but not without bumping into other particles in the soup. It’s a bit like trying to race out of a crowded room—the more people in your way, the more difficult to escape. The strength of the interactions between particles in the soup is determined by the strong force, so carefully watching particles stream out could reveal much about how the strong force operates at such high temperatures.
But a surprise was in store. Right where the gold atoms had collided, particles did indeed take longer to stream out the tips of the football than the sides, but farther from the exact point of collision, that difference evaporated. That defied a treasured theory called boost invariance. Aside from revealing that scientists are missing a piece of the physics puzzle, the findings mean that understanding these collisions fully will be much more difficult than expected. No longer can physicists measure only the sweet spot where the atoms initially collided—they now must measure the entire length of the plasma, effectively making what was a two-dimensional problem into a three-dimensional one.
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