Latest Quark matter Stories

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...

Researchers at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are setting aside four weeks to investigate the conditions of the early universe in more detail than ever before and taking a break from searching for the Higgs boson, David Shiga from New Scientist is reporting. The Higgs boson experiment has produced roughly 6 inverse femtobarns of collision data, about three times the total used in the last major analysis searching for the elusive particle, thought to endow other particles with...

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...

Berkeley Lab nuclear scientists join with their international colleagues in the latest record-breaking discovery at RHICEighteen examples of the heaviest antiparticle ever found, the nucleus of antihelium-4, have been made in the STAR experiment at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory."The STAR experiment is uniquely capable of finding antihelium-4," says the STAR experiment's spokesperson, Nu Xu, of the Nuclear...

Quantum physicists pave the way for investigating new states of matter in ultracold atom mixturesScientists of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) in Innsbruck, Austria, have reached a milestone in the exploration of quantum gas mixtures. In an international first, the research group led by Rudolf Grimm and Florian Schreck has succeeded in producing controlled strong interactions between two fermionic elements - lithium-6 and potassium-40. This model system not...

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,...

After less than three weeks of heavy-ion running, the three experiments studying lead ion collisions at the LHC have already brought new insight into matter as it would have existed in the very first instants of the Universe's life. The ALICE experiment, which is optimized for the study of heavy ions, published two papers just a few days after the start of lead-ion running. Now, the first direct observation of a phenomenon known as jet quenching has been made by both the ATLAS and CMS...

After less than three weeks of heavy-ion running, the three experiments studying lead ion collisions at the LHC have already brought new insight into matter as it would have existed in the very first instants of the Universe's life. The ALICE experiment, which is optimised for the study of heavy ions, published two papers just a few days after the start of lead-ion running. Now, the first direct observation of a phenomenon known as jet quenching has been made by both the ATLAS and CMS...

Researchers working at the world's highest-energy particle accelerator on the Franco-Swiss border are nearly set to create the Big Bang on a miniature scale. Since 2009, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been smashing protons together, trying to shed light on the essential nature of matter. But for the upcoming experiments, planned for early November and running for four weeks, the team will have the accelerator collide lead ions instead. The collider, managed by the European Organization...

Modern, compact ion injector will feed new kinds of particles to RHIC and NSRLA new source of ions will soon be the starting point for the beams entering two major research facilities at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory - the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC - http://www.bnl.gov/rhic), where physicists are recreating conditions of the early universe to learn more about the forces that hold matter together, and the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory (NSRL:...