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Tuesday, March 15, 2005 |
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NOTED: March 14-20 is Brain Awareness Week. http://www.dana.org/brainweek * * * * * * * * * March 28-April 3 is National Sleep Awareness Week. http://www.nsaw.org 4:00:34 PM  comment []
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University of Washington news release: "...[P]hysicists at Brookhaven probably have actually succeeded in creating quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that has not existed since a microsecond after the big bang that began the universe." Since 2000, scientists have been using the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven [National Laboratory on New York's Long Island] to collide gold nuclei with each other at nearly the speed of light. They are trying to get subatomic particles called quarks and gluons to separate from the nuclei and form a superheated quark-gluon plasma, 40 billion times hotter than room temperature. ... "We have taken a quantum mechanics technique, called the nuclear optical model, from an old and dusty shelf and applied it to puzzling new physics results," [UW physics professor Gerald] Miller said. "It's really a scientific detective story." The work, supported by U.S. Department of Energy grants, adds to the general understanding of what happened in the first microseconds after the big bang, he said, "and what we bring to bear is a better microscope, the microscope of quantum mechanics." ... "A microsecond after the big bang, there was a state of matter that no one was able to investigate until very recently," [UW physics professor John Cramer] said. "We are still learning, but our understanding is growing." 3:55:12 PM comment []
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