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Get Guinness. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, have achieved the hottest manmade temperatures ever, by colliding lead ions to momentarily create a quark–gluon plasma, a subatomic soup and unique state of matter that is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang.
The results come from the ALICE heavy-ion experiment (at right) — a lesser-known sibling to ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, which produced the data that led to the announcement in July that the Higgs boson had been discovered. ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, say that they have achieved a quark–gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record 4-trillion-degree plasma achieved in 2010 by a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which had been anointed the Guinness record holder.
ALICE spokesman Paolo Giubellino says that the team’s measurement is relatively uncertain and, moreover, they haven’t yet converted an energy measurement into degrees. But he says there’s no reason to suspect that the conversion won’t produce a number like 5.5 trillion degrees. “It’s a very delicate measurement,” he says. “Give us a few weeks and it will be out.”
Complete Story
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Get Guinness. Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, have achieved the hottest manmade temperatures ever, by colliding lead ions to momentarily create a quark–gluon plasma, a subatomic soup and unique state of matter that is thought to have existed just moments after the Big Bang.
The results come from the ALICE heavy-ion experiment (at right) — a lesser-known sibling to ATLAS and the Compact Muon Solenoid, which produced the data that led to the announcement in July that the Higgs boson had been discovered. ALICE physicists, presenting on Monday at Quark Matter 2012 in Washington DC, say that they have achieved a quark–gluon plasma 38% hotter than a record 4-trillion-degree plasma achieved in 2010 by a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, which had been anointed the Guinness record holder.
ALICE spokesman Paolo Giubellino says that the team’s measurement is relatively uncertain and, moreover, they haven’t yet converted an energy measurement into degrees. But he says there’s no reason to suspect that the conversion won’t produce a number like 5.5 trillion degrees. “It’s a very delicate measurement,” he says. “Give us a few weeks and it will be out.”
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