Quest for Understanding the Perfect Liquid Continues » QGP – Perfect Liquid
RHIC’s perfect liquid, a.k.a. quark-gluon plasma
At RHIC – the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory – gold ions collide at nearly the speed of light, recreating on a subatomic scale the conditions of the early universe. Scientists had expected to observe a uniform expansion of particles emerging from the collision with little or no interaction among them – characteristics of a gas. Instead, they have observed a dramatic asymmetry with more particles emerging along the reaction plane than perpendicular to it, and strong interactions among these particles. This led RHIC researchers to conclude that the early universe was a nearly perfect liquid.
