RHIC's perfect liquid a study in perfection
Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - 05:50
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) —When heavy ions (the nuclei of heavy atoms such as gold and lead) collide at high energies at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the components of the nuclei (protons and neutrons) melt to form a hot soup of their constituent particles, quarks and gluons. A new model that accurately describes the experimentally observed patterns of particles flowing out from this "quark-gluon plasma" (QGP) suggests that the effective shear viscosity, or resistance to flow, is close to the ideal limit used to define a "perfect" fluid.