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This Particle Accelerator Makes a Substance That Has Not Existed in 13 Billion Years

By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself.

By using one of the most complicated and powerful machines on the planet, scientists have found a way to glimpse back to the very beginning of time itself. This time machine is a particle accelerator, and it gives us a peek at the soup of our newborn universe. Just moments after the Big Bang, our universe was a very different place.

It started out so small, dense and hot that the building blocks of our reality atoms couldn't even form. Yet the ingredients of atoms, protons and neutrons were broken down into their most fundamental building blocks. Quarks. These quarks floated around in a perfect fluid, along with the particles that carry the force that holds them together inside of their proton and neutron homes.

Those particles are called gluons. Scientists name this universe creating fluid quark-gluon plasma. It hasn't been found in nature since the beginning of time as we know it. But scientist states can recreate it inside particle accelerators. It was officially observed first at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, where researchers used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider or RHIC for short to smash atoms together.


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RHIC's 2.4-mile-long ring speeds atomic nuclei around its massive circle 80,000 times a second at 99.995% the speed of light. They are steered in this ring by massive superconducting magnets and cooled down to near absolute zero at several points along the path, the two opposing beams of nuclei intersect and collide. The crashes give rise to explosions of particles, as well as to tiny droplets of quark-gluon plasma.

Here at Brookhaven, there are two collision points where detectors can watch the action: sPHENIX and STAR. sPHENIX is brand new. And STAR just got upgrades to make it more sensitive than ever. Each detector is like an onion with layer upon layer of nested detectors, wires, cooling tubes and electronics, pulling massive amounts of data tracking and detecting particles, energies and motions at the core of each device is a powerful superconducting magnet that can bend charged particles and identify particles of different masses.

These measurements can reveal secrets about the quark-gluon plasma, giving us a deeper understanding than ever before of how the tiniest bits of matter behave. By studying this quark soup, scientists are learning about our primordial cosmic origins and the matter all around us.

Jason Drakeford is a documentary filmmaker, video journalist and educator telling true, impactful stories with motion graphics and cinematic visuals.

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Clara Moskowitz is a senior editor at Scientific American, where she covers astronomy, space, physics and mathematics. She has been at Scientific American for a decade; previously she worked at Space.com. Moskowitz has reported live from rocket launches, space shuttle liftoffs and landings, suborbital spaceflight training, mountaintop observatories, and more. She has a bachelor's degree in astronomy and physics from Wesleyan University and a graduate degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Jeff DelViscio is currently Chief Multimedia Editor/Executive Producer at Scientific American. He is former director of multimedia at STAT, where he oversaw all visual, audio and interactive journalism. Before that, he spent over eight years at the New York Times, where he worked on five different desks across the paper. He holds dual master's degrees from Columbia in journalism and in earth and environmental sciences. He has worked aboard oceanographic research vessels and tracked money and politics in science from Washington, D.C. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT in 2018. His work has won numerous awards, including two News and Documentary Emmy Awards.

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