Thaindian News

Washington, Feb 18 (IANS) A team of physicists has created the hottest temperature ever recorded in the universe — 3.98 trillion degrees Celsius.
Two University of Colorado at Boulder (UC-B) physicists are part of a collaborative team working with the Brookhaven National Lab that accomplished the feat.

The team used Brookhaven’s giant atom smasher, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), to ram charged gold particles into each other billions of times, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” with a temperature hotter than anything known in the universe, even supernova explosions.

The experiments with RHIC produced a temperature 250,000 times hotter than the sun’s interior. The collisions created miniscule bubbles heated to temperatures 40 times hotter than the interior of a supernova.

The experiment is recreating the conditions of the universe a few microseconds after the Big Bang.

Jamie Nagle and Edward Kinney, UC-B physics professors, are collaborators on the Pioneering High Energy Nuclear Interaction experiment, or PHENIX, one of four large detectors that helps physicists analyse the particle collisions using RHIC.

PHENIX, which weighs 4,000 tonnes and has a dozen detector subsystems, sports three large steel magnets that produce high magnetic fields to bend charged particles along curved paths.

RHIC is the only machine in the world capable of colliding so called “heavy ions” — atoms that have had their outer cloud of electrons stripped away.

The research team used gold, one of the heaviest elements, for the experiment. The gold atoms were sent flying in opposite directions in RHIC, a 3.86-km underground loop located in Upton, New York.

In 1995 UC-B professor Carl Wieman and adjoint professor Eric Cornell, both physicists, led a team that created the world’s first Bose-Einstein condensate — a new form of matter.

Wieman and Cornell, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics for their work in 2001, achieved the lowest temperature ever recorded at the time by cooling rubidium atoms to less that 170 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, causing individual atoms to form a “superatom” that behaved as a single entity, said a UC-B release.