Document Type
Course
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Physics 3710 – Intermediate Modern Physics, Spring 2018
Publication Date
1-8-2018
First Page
1
Last Page
3
Abstract
The quark-gluon plasma
At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island in New York (the only major research accelerator functioning in the US) and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland, heavy atoms, stripped of most or all of their electrons, are collided with energies approaching 100-1000 GeV per nucleon. Traveling at nearly the speed of light, these heavy ions are Lorentz contracted into pancake shapes in the laboratory frame of reference and, consequently, have very large quark and gluon densities within the constituent protons and neutrons. The energy density in the collision is sufficiently high that for a brief period the nucleons “melt” into a swarm of quarks and gluons—a kind of “quark-gluon plasma” (QGP).
Recommended Citation
Peak, David, "Structure of matter, 5" (2018). Structure of Matter. Paper 5.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/intermediate_modernphysics_matter/5