Physicists produce highest man-made temperature: 7 trillion degrees

[Hum]

Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have smashed gold ions together to produce a quark-gluon plasma like that which existed in the first instant after the Big Bang that created the universe, and in doing so have produced what Guinness World Records says is the highest man-made temperature ever, 7.2 trillion degrees. That is about 250,000 times hotter than the temperature at the core of the sun. :|

Quarks are the elementary particles from which all other particles, including protons, neutrons and electrons, are made. They normally bind together so tightly that they are virtually never observed in isolation. The binding force that holds them together is provided by massless particles called gluons.

In the first ten-millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was composed of what is known as a quark-gluon plasma, but that immediately condensed into the matter we now know.

Scientists have been trying to re-create the conditions of the Big Bang to get a better understanding of how the universe was created. At Brookhaven, they are doing it with a large accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC, a 2.4-mile-long ring in which ions are accelerated to speeds near that of light.

In an experiment called PHENIX, researchers accelerated gold ions in both directions around the ring, ultimately smashing them together in one of six experimental chambers around the accelerator. The team then observed the very brief formation of the quark-gluon plasma, which turned out to be a nearly frictionless fluid with a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius (7.2 trillion degrees Fahrenheit), a feat that has now been recognized by the folks at Guinness.

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[Raa]

Hawt.

[Knife Party]

awesome stuff

[Hum]

Yes -- but can I bake pizza with it ... :laugh:

[Xilo]

I wonder how they even measure that.

[Slammers]

Please don't end the world while ur trying this lol

[Hum]

I wonder how they even measure that.

^ I guess with some electromagnetic calculation -- sure no physical thermometer is going to handle it.

[mudslag]

Hawt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wePMYM4av6Q

[+virtorio MVC]

Yes -- but can I bake pizza with it ... :laugh:

You can bake all the pizzas with it.

[DocM]

Article is wrong - electrons are not made of quarks. Electrons are leptons, a primary particle, and quarks are also primary and found in the hadron family of composite particles. The third primary family are guage bosons - the force carriers like the photon.

[Hum]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

[zeta_immersion]

wow ... interesting, but sadly we cannot use this for any real applications just yet .. imagine ME3 - SR2 High temp and pressure driving through the Sun's "atmosphere"

[Growled Member]

I wonder how long it would take to BBQ a burger like that? :p

[Tomoko]

So almost as hot as my car seats about noon today.

[ApuBo]

so, now we can burn sun?

[Som]

wasn't that in spiderman 2? :p

[The Rev]

I don't understand how they can "produce" 7 trillion degree heat on earth without destroying whatever container it's being achieved in, but still fail to obtain the technology necessary to make fusion possible (and efficient enough to be used as a primary energy source).....

[Mordkanin]

I don't understand how they can "produce" 7 trillion degree heat on earth without destroying whatever container it's being achieved in, but still fail to obtain the technology necessary to make fusion possible (and efficient enough to be used as a primary energy source).....

Such things are never 'contained' by a physical container. Any high energy (or even super-duper low energy, like nanokelvins.) experiment has to be contained by magnetic field. If it interacted with the container for even a few picoseconds, the experiment would be contaminated and it'll cool down instantly. This is actually why fusion is an intrinsically safe technology, if we can ever figure out how to do it. If there was any sort of containment failure, the interaction with the wall of the chamber would cool it down so quickly that the plasma would cool down and stop fusing almost instantly.

Basically, a huge magnetic gradient holds it in place. Standard practice for any particle physics experiment.

[The Rev]

Such things are never 'contained' by a physical container. Any high energy (or even super-duper low energy, like nanokelvins.) experiment has to be contained by magnetic field. If it interacted with the container for even a few picoseconds, the experiment would be contaminated and it'll cool down instantly. This is actually why fusion is an intrinsically safe technology, if we can ever figure out how to do it. If there was any sort of containment failure, the interaction with the wall of the chamber would cool it down so quickly that the plasma would cool down and stop fusing almost instantly.

Basically, a huge magnetic gradient holds it in place. Standard practice for any particle physics experiment.

Still, if they can produce and contain 7 trillion degrees in a magnetic field, why can they not do that in a fusion experiment? Or is it just a matter of putting in less energy than its releasing at this point?

[BannanaNinja]

Still, if they can produce and contain 7 trillion degrees in a magnetic field, why can they not do that in a fusion experiment? Or is it just a matter of putting in less energy than its releasing at this point?

The second one. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus This fusion reactor almost broke even on energy and the one currently being built http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER will hopefully output 10x the energy put in, which puts it at a feasible level for commercial production. The problem is that these reactors are still taking a long time to build. ITER's construction was started in 2007, and won't be finished until 2019. In maybe 2 or 3 more decades we could start to see fusion reactors in a commercial setting.

Another problem they are having is sustaining the energy output for long periods of time. This is another problem going to be looked at with ITER.

[Mordkanin]

Still, if they can produce and contain 7 trillion degrees in a magnetic field, why can they not do that in a fusion experiment? Or is it just a matter of putting in less energy than its releasing at this point?

That's exactly how they do it.

This is how all high energy physics are done. You can't contain anything high energy in a material vessel. Like I said: It contaminates and ruins the experiment. You're dealing with energies well beyond what is needed to liberate material from any solid material.

[Shiranui]

The results of any decent scientific experiment should never be expressed in Fahrenheit.....

[Tomoko]

The results of any decent scientific experiment should never be expressed in Fahrenheit.....

The scientists use Celsius, the article uses Fahrenheit for us.

[yowanvista]

The results of any decent scientific experiment should never be expressed in Fahrenheit.....

Indeed, I wonder why some still don't use SI Units. Barely any nation uses Fahrenheit these days.

[n_K]

The scientists use Celsius, the article uses Fahrenheit for us.

Indeed, I wonder why some still don't use SI Units. Barely any nation uses Fahrenheit these days.

Actually scientists use Kelvin, which is the celcius scale but starts at 0 instead of -273.

i.e. when people say 'wow, 30 degrees C is twice as hot as 15 degrees C' -> 303 degrees K and 288 degrees K, no-where near twice as hot ;)