MIT Physics Lecture Series: c Hot Quark Soup
Professor Krishna Rajagopal
Mon Jan 11, 01:30-02:30pm, 6-120
No enrollment limit, no advance sign up
Single session event
What was the universe like microseconds after the big bang? At very high temperatures, protons and neutrons fall apart - the quarks that are ordinarily confined within them are freed. Matter at these temperatures was thought to be a tenuous gas-like plasma. Then, experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven started recreating little droplets of big bang matter. And nature served up hot quark soup-the stuff of the big bang turns out to be a liquid. This realization has allowed, even driven, physicists trying to predict further properties of hot quark soup to use calculations done via string theory.
Contact: Nancy Boyce, 4-315, 253-4461, nboyce@mit.edu
Sponsor: Physics
Latest update: 04-Nov-2009
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