Latest Quantum chromodynamics Stories

Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online According to a study in the journal Nature, a team of international scientists has found the first ever direct evidence of pear-shaped atomic nuclei. Bizarre pear-shaped nuclei could be the key to understanding one of the great mysteries of the universe: the reason for the Big Bang’s creation of a massive imbalance between matter and antimatter. "If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created at the Big Bang, everything...

John P. Millis, Ph.D. for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online In September 2012, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) conducted a short run of collisions between protons and lead nuclei. The roughly two million events recorded were set to serve as a baseline for lead-lead collisions anticipated for next year. However, these events produced an unexpected result. Ridge Correlations Very high-energy particle collisions produce thousands of new particles which stream away from the collision...

April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed the first glimpses of a possible boundary separating ordinary nuclear matter, made up of protons and neutrons, from the seething soup of their constituent quarks and gluons using the versatility and new capabilities of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). A quark-gluon plasma (QGP) exists at extremely high temperatures or density,...

Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Scientists working at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider are gaining a better understanding of the primordial universe through experimentation involving the use of heavy ions. The collaborations between the ALICE, ATLAS and CMS projects have made new measurements of the kind of matter that most likely existed during the creation of the universe more than 13 billion years ago. Results of their experiments will be presented at the...

[ Watch the Video ] Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com As record-setting heat and wildfires continue to consume Colorado, one team of scientists has created a temperature so hot the Sun would melt. Scientists working with a giant atom smasher at New York's Brookhaven National Laboratory have created the hottest temperature ever seen on Earth, at 7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit. The excruciatingly hot temperature has been verified by the Guinness Book of Records, and confirmed as...

Research spurs innovations in computing technology that drive advances to supercomputers An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), which revealed the first...

Previous theories imposed a limit on how 'liquid' fluids can be -- but new calculations show that quark-gluon-plasma in high-energy particle accelerators can be even have a lower viscosity than this limit suggests How liquid can a fluid be? This is a question particle physicists at the Vienna University of Technology have been working on. The "most perfect liquid" is nothing like water, but the extremely hot quark-gluon-plasma which is produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Large Hadron...

By comparing theory with data from STAR, Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues map phase changes in the quark-gluon plasmaIn its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quark"“gluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter "froze out": the quarks became bound together by the exchange of...

Researchers use the NSF-supported Ranger supercomputer to explore alternative particle theoriesAs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) ramps up the rate and impact of its collisions, physicists hope to witness the emergence of the Higgs boson, an anticipated, but as-yet-unseen, fundamental particle that scientists believe gives mass to matter.The Higgs boson is a central component of the "standard model," a theory that defines the relationships between the forces of the universe. But,...

Direct measurements allow detailed look at how quarks of different flavors contribute to spinScientists hoping to unravel the mystery of proton spin at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, have a new tool at their disposal "” the first to directly explore how quarks of different types, or "flavors," contribute to the overall spin of the proton. The technique,...