One of the largest experiments in modern physics has started in the USA. The modernized Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has started operating at Brookhaven National Laboratory, designed to reproduce the conditions that existed in the Universe in the first microseconds after the Big Bang.
The main goal of the project is to study quark-gluon plasma – a special state of matter in which elementary particles move freely, and are not bound as protons and neutrons. Scientists believe that this is the form in which matter existed immediately after the birth of space, before the process of forming familiar particles began.
For the experiment, physicists accelerate heavy gold ions to speeds close to the speed of light and collide them, creating a temperature of trillions of degrees. These values are hundreds of thousands of times higher than the temperature of the Sun’s core and allow us to reconstruct the conditions of the early Universe for fractions of a second.
Researchers expect that the new data will help to reveal the mechanisms of energy-to-matter conversion, explain the process of formation of stable matter and expand knowledge about the fundamental laws of nature. The experiment can also reveal phenomena that go beyond the Standard Model of physics and deepen our understanding of the strong interaction – the force that holds quarks together as protons and neutrons.
The launch of the updated RHIC program is considered a major milestone in world science, along with research at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
