Saturday Physics for Everyone
Soon after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for normal matter to exist. Instead, the universe was made up of an extremely hot liquid of quarks and gluons: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). As the universe cooled, these quarks and gluons combined into protons and neutrons, which later formed atomic nuclei. Those nuclei are at the center of the atoms that make up the matter around us today. To learn about the QGP, we use particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to collide pairs of nuclei at nearly the speed of light. Each collision has enough energy to melt the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei and create a tiny droplet of the QGP. I will discuss how we study the QGP in our lab and what we have learned.
| Title | A Look Inside the Hottest Matter in the Universe |
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| Speaker | Professor Anne Sickles, Department of Physics, University of Illinois |
| Date: | 9/15/2018 |
| Time: | 10:15 a.m. |
| Location: | 141 Loomis Laboratory |
| Sponsor: | Department of Physics |
| Originating Calendar: | Physics - Saturday Physics for Everyone |
| Abstract: | Soon after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for normal matter to exist. Instead, the universe was made up of an extremely hot liquid of quarks and gluons: the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). As the universe cooled, these quarks and gluons combined into protons and neutrons, which later formed atomic nuclei. Those nuclei are at the center of the atoms that make up the matter around us today. To learn about the QGP, we use particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN to collide pairs of nuclei at nearly the speed of light. Each collision has enough energy to melt the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei and create a tiny droplet of the QGP. I will discuss how we study the QGP in our lab and what we have learned.
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