Early Universe the Perfect Liquid

Work at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory have revealed that free quarks and gluons form a new state of matter, behaving like a perfect liquid. Quarks and gluons are the building blocks of the atomic nuclei, and in the early universe have been thought to have been in a gaseous state before cooling to form atoms of hydrogen. The observations from collisions of gold ions fits the theorectical predictions for a quark-gluon plasma -- the type of matter thought to have existed microseconds after the Big Bang. In the observations, the trajectories of thousands of particles from collisions move collectively, responding together to pressure variations. This motion is akin to fluid motion and can be described by the equations of hydrodynamics.

For more information, check out:
  • Hunting the Quark Gluon Plasma [PDF, 9.5MB]

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