The Sound of the Little Bangs

We wondered what the aftermath of the collision of two gold ions traveling nearly at the speed of light would “sound” like, when the frequencies are converted to the frequency range of human hearing. So Paul Sorensen and I determined that sound starting from data taken at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) of Brookhaven Lab, and my student, Alex Doig, senior illustration major at Pratt Institute, accompanied it with illustrations and animations.

At RHIC physicists create matter as hot and dense as the universe was a millionth of a second after the Big Bang. For this reason, the collisions are sometimes called “little bangs”. When gold ions traveling at nearly the speed of light smash into each other a vast amount of energy (a large fraction of the 40 trillion electron volts from the colliding beams) is deposited into a tiny region in space, one millionth of one billionth of a meter across. This tiny speck of matter produced in these little bangs...

link

Hear the little bang "sound":

Research presentation:

Link for the research:
soundofthelittlebang.com

... Inside the QGP, there are no protons and neutrons, just a seething mix of quarks and gluons in a soup that is 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. This matter is created thousands or even millions of times per second in the collision of gold nuclei at the RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

link

Woah!

So that's how we create plasma @ 4 trillion degrees Celsius.

Pretty amazing IMO, not just the temperature this "very hot fireball created in little bangs" create, but also the energy these particles are being accelerated at, 40TeV.
That's a pretty impressive particle smasher as far as I know.

So, although I don't really understand the science behind the research and it's implications, I thought you guys would like to know about it, and also "hear" about it.


To mods, I used the search function and could find nothing detailing this research. Also, I had doubts about wich board to post, feel free to move it.

[edit on 10/6/2010 by MorfeuZ]

[edit on 11/6/2010 by MorfeuZ]