CU Physicists help reveal secrets of the "perfect fluid" formed in Big Bang

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Jul 2015 06:34:43 +0000

CU Physicists help reveal secrets of the "perfect fluid" formed in Big Bang Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 07/17/2015 - 00:34

The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory has succeeded in creating distinct droplets of the quark-gluon plasma, the material that made up the Universe during the very first moments of the Big Bang. "These experiments are revealing the key elements required for creating quark-gluon plasma," said CU physics professor Jamie Nagle, co-spokesperson for the PHENIX experiment at RHIC.

In 2005, scientists at RHIC (pictured right) observed that gold-gold nuclear collisions created a quark-gluon plasma that acts like a "perfect fluid" which flows nearly without resistance. This experiment collides small nuclei, such as deuterium and helium, with gold nuclei, producing distinct droplets of the quark-gluon plasma in order to measure the properties of the perfect fluid. "RHIC is the only accelerator in the world where we can perform such a tightly controlled experiment, colliding particles made of one, two, and three components with the same larger nucleus, gold, all at the same energy," said Nagle. "This is the way to do good basic science—change just one thing at a time, the number of particles in the ion smashing into the gold nucleus, to test for these interesting geometrical effects."

The analysis of the events (pictured right) reveals that the helium-gold collisions exhibit a triangular pattern of flow that is consistent with the creation of three tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma.

Nagle and physics assistant professor Paul Romatschke (pictured left) proposed this experiment in 2014. Romatschke's theoretical calculation correctly described the behavior of the droplets in the experiment. "The fact that our predictions were confirmed by experiment seems to suggest that hydrodynamic theory is much more robust than was thought just a few years ago. This is very gratifying," said Romatschke.

"This is a pretty definitive measurement," Nagle said. "We are really engineering different shapes of the quark-gluon plasma to manipulate it and see how it behaves.”

View the BNL Press Release

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Paul Romatschke Wins Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship

Anonymous — Wed, 15 Feb 2012 06:09:00 +0000

Paul Romatschke Wins Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 02/14/2012 - 23:09

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Paul Romatschke for winning a 2012 Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship. The award was announced on Wednesday, February 15^th.

"I feel honored to receive this prestigious award for my research in relativistic fluid dynamics and its application to high energy nuclear physics," Romatschke said.

According to their web site, the Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. This year, 126 researchers were recognized for their distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. Romatschke was one of two CU ��«��Ƶ Professors to be awarded a 2012 Fellowship.

Dr. Romatschke is a theoretical nuclear physicist working on the fundamentals of relativistic hydrodynamics. He has made important contributions to the theory of relativistic heavy ion collisions and the quark-gluon plasma, and his work has important implications for astrophysics and string theory.

"I intend to use the the award to continue doing studies in relativistic fluid dynamics and explore the deep connections between strongly coupled systems such as quark gluon plasma and cold atom experiments. Despite the fact that it has been around for more than 250 years, there are still many interesting open questions in fluid dynamics, and I am extremely happy that I have the opportunity to do research on a topic that is relevant for so many different areas of physics, even though it has all but disappeared from physics curricula."

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