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A brand new particle detector has handed an important check that reveals it is able to detect the “ashes” left over from a novel primordial soup that crammed the universe instantly after the Big Bang.
The sPHENIX detector is the newest experiment on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) ring accelerator situated at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. The second strongest particle accelerator on this planet, after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the RHIC smashes collectively protons and ions of heavy parts like gold at speeds approaching the velocity of sunshine to create “quark-gluon plasma,” the state of matter that existed fleetingly after the Big Bang.
This state of matter exists solely at extraordinarily excessive temperatures and densities and is a “soup” of free quarks and gluons, the basic particles that make up protons. Understanding quark-gluon plasma might reveal what situations within the universe had been like in its first microseconds and the way this gave method to protons and neutrons — and finally, the matter that populates the cosmos at present.
The key check handed by sPHENIX to show it is able to measure the properties of quark-gluon plasma is known as a “standard candle” in particle physics. This is not to be confused with Type 1a supernovas, the “standard candles” that astronomers use to measure cosmic distances.
In this case, “standard candle” refers to a measurement of a well-established constant that can be used to assess the precision of a detector. The sPHENIX project passed this benchmark by precisely measuring the number of particles created when two gold ions smash together at close to the speed of light, and by gauging the collective energy of these particles.
The detector was also able to determine the number of charged particles launched during a head-on collision between gold ions and those launched in a glancing collision between gold ions.
sPHENIX found that 10 times more particles were created in head-on collisions and that these particles had 10 times the energy of those generated during a glancing collision.
“This indicates the detector works as it should,” Gunther Roland, a sPHENIX Collaboration team member and a professor of physics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. “It’s as if you sent a new telescope up in space after you’ve spent 10 years building it, and it snaps the first picture. It’s not necessarily a picture of something completely new, but it proves that it’s now ready to start doing new science.”
Quark-gluon plasma doesn’t hang around
Particle accelerators like the RHIC fling particles around at almost light speed in opposite circular beams, which, when they meet, release a huge amount of energy. This energy can appear in the form of a quark-gluon plasma.
This quark-gluon plasma didn’t stick around for long at the beginning of the universe, however, and its existence in particle accelerators is equally short-lived. When the quark-gluon plasma is generated, it lasts for just a sextillionth of a second. During its existence, it has a temperature of many trillions of degrees; its particles act in concert as a “perfect fluid” rather than a collection of random particles.
As the plasma cools, this exotic state vanishes, and the quark-gluon plasma forms protons and neutrons, which race away from the site of the initial particle collisions.
“You never see the quark-gluon plasma itself — you just see its ashes, so to speak, in the form of the particles that come from its decay,” Roland explained. “With sPHENIX, we want to measure these particles to reconstruct the properties of the quark-gluon plasma, which is essentially gone in an instant.”
The sPHENIX detector, which is the size of a two-story house and weighs about 1,000 tons, sits between the two main beams of the RHIC waiting to be bombarded with particles from collisions. sPHENIX is the next generation replacement for the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction Experiment (PHENIX) and is capable of catching and measuring 15,000 particle collisions per second.
It’s systems allow it to act like a huge 3D camera tracking the number of particles produced in these collisions, their energies and even their trajectories.
“SPHENIX takes advantage of developments in detector technology since RHIC switched on 25 years ago, to collect data at the fastest possible rate,” team member and MIT researcher Cameron Dean said. “This allows us to probe incredibly rare processes for the first time.”
The team put sPHENIX through its paces with this standard candle test over 3 weeks during the Fall of 2024.
“The fun for sPHENIX is just beginning,” Dean added. “We are currently back colliding particles and expect to do so for several more months. With all our data, we can look for the one-in-a-billion rare process that could give us insights on things like the density of QGP, the diffusion of particles through ultra-dense matter, and how much energy it takes to bind different particles together.”
The team’s research was published in the August edition of the Journal of High Energy Physics,
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