The “Big Bang Machine” passes in New York

We know very little about the first minute after the big explosion. We have theories, Most of them are still verifying weakness and trilogy to see if they have a scientific meaning. The search process can seem boring at times, but the newcomer from Long Island offers promising developments in our endeavor to understand how our world has become.

In a modern paper for High Energy Physics MagazineThe researchers announced in SPhenix’s cooperation that it had passed a “standard candle” test in airline colors, picked up and measured the energy level in the collision of gold ions running near the speed of light.

the Sphenix Detector is a 1000 -ton tool, two floors equipped with a strong camera that hunts and measures 15,000 collision of particles per second. It is the long -awaited upgrade to Phiix, a detector now retires in the IN heavy IN Correlation in the BROKHAVEN National Laboratory (RHIC).

“This indicates that the detector is working as it should,” said Gonter Roland, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and SPhenix Cooperation. News of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems as if you had sent a new telescope in space after you spent 10 years to build it, and the first image is behaved. It is not necessarily a picture of something completely new, but it proves that it is now ready to start doing a new science.”

Hot chaos of the early universe

Quarks and Glon are basic molecules that form protons and neutrons. It is usually almost impossible to dismantle these two particles, unless they are in a very high temperature and pressure environment – such as a few delicate after the big explosion.

Under these circumstances, quarks and thorns were located separately in a thick plasma known as the soup known as Cark Glon Plasma (QGP). RHIC tries to repeat these conditions by overcoming molecules in opposite directions. When some of these particles crash each other, they launch a giant load of energy that is very short – for one second car – as QGP.

Roland said: “QGP never sees itself – you just see its ashes, if it is permissible to speak, in the form of particles that come from its decomposition,” Roland said. “With sphenix, we want to measure these particles to rebuild the QGP properties, which were done in a moment.”

“The Big Bang”

Passing the test preaches for the future of the detector. However, the team wants to put it through a few quality checks. The researchers said that the SPhenix detector is similar to a “giant 3D camera” to track the number, energy and particles of the particles caused by one collision.

“SPHENIX benefits from developments in detector technology since RHIC has been operated 25 years ago to collect data as quickly as possible,” said Cameron Dean, a post -PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of SPhenix’s cooperation, for MIT News. “This allows us to research incredibly rare operations for the first time.”

Ironically is that the same features that make SPhenix impressive are also the cause of a lot of maintenance. But the researchers hope that they will be on the right path. As of now, Spheenix is ​​busy collecting data for Rhic’s The twenty -fifth and last termThen, the caliph of the collision, the Electric-ion collision, will take over.

Dean said, “The fun of SPhenix just started,” Dean said.