The LHC no longer news. The most powerful accelerator in the world, with its 27 kilometers in circumference and hundreds of powerful magnets, made yesterday collide lead nuclei at the highest energy ever achieved so far. Last summer, the large collider partícuas already achieved a record collision energy of protons, but this is very different. In fact, is not the same speed a single particle complex atomic nucleus, as is the lead, which is formed by 208 protons and neutrons.
The goal of these experiments is to understand a little better the properties of matter just a few moments after the Big Bang, when the universe emerging interactions between particles are produced in huge levels of energy that, until now, were impossible to achieve in a laboratory.
Right at the beginning, ie, a few billionths of a second instant of the Big Bang, the universe was made of a “primordial soup” of fundamental (especially quarks and gluons) particles very dense and thick. That is to say, in a state called “quark-gluon plasma” or QGP, for its acronym in English. But in no time, about a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, all the quarks and gluons were traveling freely confined inside protons and neutrons, which are the main constituents of the nuclei of all atoms in today.
That’s when the so-called strong nuclear force (which is precisely the mediating particle gluon) made the quarks together to be trapped inside the particles that then formed the first nuclei atomic. But that initial state of matter where quarks and gluons traveling freely around the newborn universe can be recreated in the laboratory. And that is precisely what physicists have succeeded in this experiment at the LHC, during which have achieved the highest temperatures reached so far in a collision of lead ions.
“The collision energy two cores reached 1,000 TeV (tera), which is the same as a bumblebee would crash into our cheek for a summer day explains Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje, professor at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University and researcher at the ALICE experiment LHC-. Only in the collision entree two nuclei, this energy is concentrated in a volume that is approximately 10 to 27 (10 raised to the minus 27) times lower (ie smaller one billion times). The concentration of this energy (density) is, therefore, tremendous, and never had been achieved under terrestrial conditions reach “.
Gaardhøje Jens Jørgen explains that the purpose of these collisions is to transform most the enormous kinetic energy of atomic nuclei in the field, in the form of a series of new particles (quarks), and their corresponding antiparticles (antiquarks), consistent with Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2. These collisions, for , created, for a fleeting moment, a small volume of material made exclusively of quarks, antiquarks and gluons and temperatures of 4,000 million degrees. That is, the same that prevailed immediately after the Big Bang.
“Although it is too early for a full analysis, early results tell us that for every collision between two lead ions managed to create 30,000 new particles explains Jens Jørgen Gaardhøje-. This corresponds to an energy density unprecedented 40 times the energy density of a proton. “
This enormous energy density will allow researchers to develop new and more detailed quark-gluon plasma models and the strong nuclear force, which binds allowing the quarks to form atomic nuclei. And also understand the conditions that prevailed in the newborn universe, just one billionth of a second of the Big Bang
Source:. Abc.es
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