New Elements

[Jeunemaitre]

Question?  What sort of matter do they theorize existed before the big bang?

DISCLAIMER: I am not a nuclear physicist, nor do I play one on TV, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night, but I did find out the following information from the RHIC website: Main site or the collision primer series of pages starting here

The theory goes: as you raise the temperature of any substance, you increase the level of molecular motion in that substance (definition of temperature). If you raise the temperature high enough, the electrons will begin to disassociate from the nuclei, leaving a plasma state of positive ions floating through a sea of randomly distributed electrons. (This is how that come up with the "heavy ions" that are used in the RHIC)

Now that you have naked nuclei, if you continue to increase the temperature, you can reach a plasma state where the protons start to pull away from the neutrons, reversing nucleosynthesis (this is thought to happen just above 10^9th k). Keep raising the temperature to up above 10^12 k and you begin to reverse a process called hadronization. Hadrons are the commonly known nucleic subatomic particles (I think this refers to protons and neutrons only), and they are made up of smaller particles called quarks. There are several flavors of quarks (top, left, etc.), a specific combination of which creates a proton, and a different combination creates a neutron. The quarks are held together by bridge particles called gluons (glue - ons, physicists can be really uncreative sometimes). When you get to the point of reversing hadronization, you break the bigger particles into the quarks and gluons that make them up forming a "quark-gluon" plasma.

It's thought that this quark-gluon plasma existed as the only state of matter immediately preceding the big bang. Because there's no practical way to keep a bunch atoms at a temperature that high for any length of time in order to study them, physicists have to do it another way. Enter colliders: by accelerating atoms to very high speeds and smashing them together to see what flies out of the collision. With enough data about what comes out of the collision and what went into it, they can infer what happened in the instant when the two nuclei collided.


edit: stupid fingers, wrong button. Never hit submit post before typing the post