Communication is one thing, but speed of light communication is something entirely different. Let alone catching up to something that is travelling close to the speed of light, to deliver a message at the same time; yeah, that’s an accomplishment.
And it looks like the physicists at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) have managed to achieve this task, an achievement that may eventually help save time and money in the lab.
The particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, consists of a 2.3 mile-circumference racetrack that the team fling their particle beams around. Moving at close to the speed of light, and clashing into each other, they provide insights into what life was like immediately after the big bang.
The new achievement consists of being able to both detect the subtle fluctuations in RHIC’s particle beams as they speed around the track, and convey corrections to specialized devices that smooth out the fluctuations as the beam and passes through.
"These corrections help to keep the beams focused and colliding, recreating thousands of times a second the conditions that existed just after the Big Bang," said Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven Lab's Associate Laboratory Director for Nuclear and Particle Physics, who manages the RHIC program.
An example of what the team are finding with their collider is evidence that mere microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe a nearly perfect liquid, with “virtually no viscosity and strong interactions among its constituents.” The ability to create more and more of these mini-Bangs will provide more data, which will subsequently allow the team to find out more about this “perfect liquid.”
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
