'Perfect' Liquid Hot Enough to be Quark Soup (w/ Video)
Monday, February 15, 2010 - 10:21
in Physics & Chemistry
Recent analyses from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a 2.4-mile-circumference "atom smasher" at the U.S. DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, establish that collisions of gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light have created matter at a temperature of about 4 trillion degrees Celsius - the hottest temperature ever reached in a laboratory, about 250,000 times hotter than the center of the Sun. This temperature, based upon measurements by the PHENIX collaboration at RHIC, is higher than the temperature needed to melt protons and neutrons into a plasma of quarks and gluons. Details of the findings will be published in Physical Review Letters.