RHIC Sees Another First

The quark-gluon plasma created at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) continues to produce a rich body of information. They have now announced that the quark-gluon plasma has produced the most rapidly-spinning fluid ever produced.

Collisions with heavy ions—typically gold or lead—put lots of protons and neutrons in a small volume with lots of energy. Under these conditions, the neat boundaries of those particles break down. For a brief instant, quarks and gluons mingle freely, creating a quark-gluon plasma. This state of matter has not been seen since an instant after the Big Bang, and it has plenty of unusual properties. "It has all sorts of superlatives," Ohio State physicist Mike Lisa told Ars. "It is the most easily flowing fluid in nature. It's highly explosive, much more than a supernova. It's hotter than any fluid that's known in nature."
.
.
.
We can now add another superlative to the quark-gluon plasma's list of "mosts:" it can be the most rapidly spinning fluid we know of. Much of the study of the material has focused on the results of two heavy ions smacking each other head-on, since that puts the most energy into the resulting debris, and these collisions spit the most particles out. But in many collisions, the two ions don't hit each other head-on—they strike a more glancing blow.

It is a fascinating article, and you may read the significance of this study, especially in relation to how it informs us on certain aspect of QCD symmetry.

But if you know me, I never fail to try to point something out that is more general in nature, and something that the general public should take note of. I like this statement in the article very much, and I'd like to highlight it here:

But a logical "should" doesn't always equal a "does," so it's important to confirm that the resulting material is actually spinning. And that's a rather large technical challenge when you're talking about a glob of material roughly the same size as an atomic nucleus.

This is what truly distinguish science with other aspects of our lives. There are many instances, especially in politics, social policies, etc., where certain assertions are made and appear to be "obvious" or "logical", and yet, these are simply statements made without any valid evidence to support it. I can think of many ("Illegal immigrants taking away jobs", or "gay marriages undermines traditional marriages", etc...etc). Yet, no matter how "logical" these may appear to be, they are simply statements that are devoid of evidence to support them. Still, whenever they are uttered, many in the public accept them as FACTS or valid, without seeking or requiring evidence to support them. One may believe that "A should cause B", but DOES IT REALLY?

Luckily, this is NOT how it is done in science. No matter how obvious it is, or how verified something is, there are always new boundaries to push and a retesting of the ideas, even ones that are known to be true under certain conditions. And a set of experimental evidence is the ONLY standard that will settle and verify any assertion and statements.

This is why everyone should learn science, not just for the material, but to understand the methodology and technique. It is too bad they don't require politicians to have such skills.

Zz.

Brookhaven Lab Wins PR Award

In another example of a scientific organization really putting in thoughtful effort to convey news and messages to the media and public, Brookhaven National Laboratory has won two "Bulldog" awards for excellence in media and public relations.

The Brookhaven Lab campaign won a Gold award in the “Best Campaign Under $25,000” category, and a Bronze award in the “Best Not-for-Profit/Association/Government Campaign” category. In 2010, the campaign also won a Bronze Anvil Award of Commendation from the Public Relations Society of America.
.
.
.
In the award-winning campaign, Brookhaven Lab and its communications counsel developed and executed a strategy to announce two major results related to RHIC scientists’ quest for the primordial matter known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP) through RHIC’s high-speed collisions of heavy ions. Scientists believe such a quark-gluon plasma filled the early universe some 14 billion years ago, before ordinary constituents of matter such as protons and neutrons — let alone stars, planets, and galaxies — ever formed.

Well done!

Zz.

A Day At RHIC

I mentioned a while back about the Brookhaven Lab's Summer Sunday Tours that they have each year. If you have a chance, this is something you shouldn't miss.

They highlight a particular facility on each of the Sunday tour. In this news report (more like a trip report), the writer went on the Summer Sunday tour that was highlighting the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It appears to be quite an extensive tours, with a look at the main detectors.

Our group then got on a bus headed for STAR, one of two detectors we would see. STAR stands for Solenoidal Tracker At Relativistic. Xian Li, a brilliant doctorate student, told us how heavy ions are smashed together in a structure that looks like a huge roulette wheel. Even more brilliant was a 12-year-old girl named Mikaela Egbert, who showed me how to use my cell phone to take pictures.

Our next stop was the other detector, PHENIX, which stands for Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interactions eXperiment. Aside from not being in Arizona, PHENIX also is where scientists collide heavy ions. Protons are collided in both detectors as well.

Sounds like fun! Don't you wish you could have been there?

Zz.

Exotic Antinucleus Detected At RHIC

More exciting stuff coming out of RHIC lately. This one is way up there. They have announce the discovery of heaviest known antinucleus and the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark.

The new antinucleus, discovered at RHIC's STAR detector (http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/STAR.asp), is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron, and an anti-Lambda particle. It is also the first antinucleus containing an anti-strange quark. The results will be published online by Science Express on March 4, 2010.

Zz.

Hot Quark Soup Produced at RHIC

A rather neat simulation and explanation of what they are looking at at RHIC. Here's the brief explanation that came with the video:

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) is a 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator/collider that has been operating at Brookhaven Lab since 2000, delivering collisions of heavy ions, protons, and other particles to an international team of physicists investigating the basic structure and fundamental forces of matter. In 2005, RHIC physicists announced that the matter created in RHICs most energetic collisions behaves like a nearly perfect liquid in that it has extraordinarily low viscosity, or resistance to flow. Since then, the scientists have been taking a closer look at this remarkable form of matter, which last existed some 13 billion years ago, a mere fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Scientists have revelaed new findings, including the first measurement of temperature very early in the collision events, and their implications for the nature of this early-universe matter.

Edit: here's a news article on this from Reuters, and another from the NY Times.

The departure from normal physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.

Zz

Yoctosecond Photon Pulse?

We have had attosecond and zeptosecond time scale for photon pulses, but now comes yoctosecond! I'm not all that up on these various terminology, and I had to go look up what yoctosecond is. It is 10^-24 second. A new paper published in PRL this week talks about the possibility of producing photon pulses of that time scale from heavy-ion collisions such as from the one at RHIC[1].

What comes after yoctosecond?

Zz.

[1] A. Ipp et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. v.103, p.152301 (2009).

Edit : There's a coverage of this work in APS Physics. You might even get free access to the paper!

For RHIC and LHC, Data Is King!

While people are very caught up with the powering up of the LHC and anticipating first collision, many people forget that there's a another monumental task ahead for many people - the handling of an believable amount of data that will be coming out of the various detectors at the LHC. No amount of real-world application comes close to matching the data-handling task that has to be carried out once the LHC is in full operation.

This article looks at the daunting task of distributing just the anticipated data coming from the ATLAS detector at the LHC.

As the sole Tier 1 computing facility for ATLAS in the United States, Brookhaven provides a large portion of the overall computing resources for U.S. collaborators and serves as the central hub for storing, processing and distributing ATLAS experimental data among scientists across the country.

This mission is possible because of the ability to build upon and receive support from the Open Science Grid project, Ernst said. Yet, even after ramping up to 8 petabytes of accessible online storage – a capacity ten times greater than existed when ATLAS joined the RACF eight years ago – the computing center’s scientists still have plenty of testing and problem-solving to conduct before the LHC begins operations this fall.

It is not an understatement that many advances in computing that we see today were driven by the needs of scientific projects such as this. What is being done here will eventually trickle down to various parts of society in a few years.

Zz.

Accelerator Disaster Scenarios, the Unabomber, and Scientific Risks

I just want to say that I had a lot of fun reading this preprint by Joseph Kapusta. It is entertaining, insightful, and has a ton of information for both scientists and non-scientists alike. It reinforces the point that I've been trying to make, which is the constant miscommunication between scientists and non-scientists. The blame goes on both sides - scientists for not considering how what they say is being interpreted by the public, and the public for not self-educating themselves into trying to understand not just the science, but the vocabulary that science uses. Not being aware that there are discontinuity in the communications and understanding of the two parties is the first significant problem. This is also a very good opportunity to again highlights the wonderful essay written by Helen Quinn that I've mentioned a while back. Everyone should read it!

If you have some time, I'd recommend reading this article by Kapusta, even for just for its "storytelling" aspect.

Zz.

Follow-Up To The LHC Lawsuit

I was reading Bob Park's entry (April 4, 2008) of this LHC lawsuit yesterday, and it brought back memories of the almost-identical issue being faced when RHIC was about to start up. It was such a brouhaha that even Comedy Central covered it! :)

It is worthwhile to note of the in-depth study that was done at that time to dispel the myth that RHIC would create not only black holes in its collisions, but a catastrophic one. And unlike the joker who filed that lawsuit, this scenario was brought up not by an ignorant individual, but rather by a few physicists themselves. So certainly it warranted a careful consideration.

However, there were two different issues involved here. The first was the careful study of the claims made within the scenario, i.e. can there be a catastrophic creation of blackholes that could spell disaster. This was easily dispelled because of the existence of the moon (you'll have to read the full report). The second one was more difficult to explain to the general public. In many instances in physics, we see different phenomena that share the same mathematical description or formulation. The similarities of the mathematics from some aspect of condensed matter physics and elementary particle physics is one example. This is again what happened in a RHIC blackhole scenario. The problem here is that once that comparison got out, it caught fire among the media and the general public, who weren't able to know the significance of such a comparison. All they see is the "headlines" of blackholes being created, and that's that.

Again, this is where, if one doesn't have the necessary knowledge to decipher the information, one can be easily mislead by news reports. Sometime, it is the fault of scientists themselves for sensationalizing the issue (example: quantum teleportation, and anything Michio Kaku has written in his latest pop-science book). The public does not have the understanding and the formalism in mind when they read these things, unlike physicists. All they can do is associate what they read with what they know, and what they know come mostly from the media, TV, movies, etc. So it should not be a surprise that they can't tell the different between the "quantum teleportation" as a demonstration of quantum entanglement, and the teleportation they saw in Star Trek. When you use the same word, you should expect the pedestrian meaning of it to dominate, where it is accurate or not.

Zz.

Addendum: Looks like the Editorial in the NY Times has it right.

More than once over the years we have felt as if we were transported to another universe listening to lawyers and judges wield the complexities and arcana of their trade. It would be fun to watch them struggle with theoretical physics. But if the courts have any sense, they will drop this suit into the nearest black hole.