Complex swirls and vortices can appear in the souplike phase of matter that existed just moments after the Big Bang. Computer simulations show that this substance, called the quark-gluon plasma, can contain “the hottest smoke ring in nature,” says Xin-Nian Wang of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, coauthor of a paper published in the Nov. 4 Physical Review Letters.
Wang and colleagues simulated collisions like those at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where gold ions are slammed together at nearly the speed of light. Such smashups produce an extremely hot, dense fluid, in which particles called quarks and gluons — the constituents of protons and neutrons — roam free. This quark-gluon plasma hits temperatures of trillions of degrees Celsius, hundreds of thousands of times hotter than the core of the sun (SN: 03/13/10, p.8).
Studying the whorls that appear in this quark-gluon plasma “is a truly new direction,” says physicist Michael Lisa of Ohio State University. When scientists initially began investigating the plasma, they thought it would behave like a simple fireball, expanding rapidly outward. But the reality has been more complicated.
To read more, click here.