Small bang: Computer simulation of output from collision of gold ions (Star Collaboration and Brookhaven National Laboratory) |
The Big Bang Is Back
A high-powered physics experiment promises
to turn back the clock to a microsecond after the birth of the universe
By Adam Rogers
This is probably not the way the world ends:
sometime this fall, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory will tap a few commands
into a computer terminal, bringing their new particle accelerator—the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC—up to full power. Atoms of gold—heavy enough to
cause some real quantum fireworks—will course around two nearly circular, 2.4-mile
"racetracks" in opposite directions at 99.9 percent of the speed of light. The
nuclei will smash into each other, exploding at a temperature 10,000 times hotter than at
the center of the sun. For a hundred trillionths of a trillionth of a second, conditions
will mirror the universe immediately after the big bang. From that brief genesis, though,
a new universe will not be born. It won't grow, and it won't destroy the pre-existing
universe, one we know and love. No Apocalypse, no Big Goodbye.
So don't panic. Brookhaven physicists really are shaking down RHIC. And while they checked to make sure they weren't going to bring about the End Time in the process, they are going to be playing with some seriously primal forces. The $365 million collider will accelerate heavier ions—charged atomic particles—at higher energies than anywhere else in the world. If all goes well, RHIC will indeed simulate the universe right after the big bang and create a state of matter unseen on Earth, testing basic theories about what the universe is made of and how it got that way. "It's like a tiny peephole into the whole way cosmology works," says Miklos Gyulassy, a physicist at Columbia University. "We're trying to re-create the birth of the universe in a laboratory."
Under construction since 1991, RHIC is the largest accelerator at Brookhaven, on New York's Long Island. Other accelerators, like those at CERN in Switzerland or Fermilab in Illinois, generally shoot particles called protons. RHIC heaves complete nuclei, anything from a hydrogen nucleus—one proton—to a gold nucleus, a massive 79 protons and 118 neutrons. It does it at astounding energies—each particle in a gold nucleus has an energy measuring 100 billion electron-volts. RHIC accelerates them with a series of electrical fields into head-on collisions registering 40 trillion electron-volts.
