Giant collider creating new kind of matter
Colour-Glass Condensate Produced From Particle Collision At Cern,Say Researchers
Washington:
Collisions at the Large Hadron Collider may have created a new type of
matter known as colour-glass condensate,scientists believe.Collisions
between protons and lead ions at the LHC near Geneva,Switzerland,have
resulted in surprising behaviour in some of the particles created by the
collisions,Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) news reported.
When
beams of particles crash into each other at highspeeds,the collisions
yield hundreds of new particles,most of which fly away from the
collision point almost at the speed of light.But,the Compact Muon
Solenoid team at LHC found that in a sample of 2 million lead-proton
collisions,some pairs of particles flew away from each other with their
respective directions correlated.
Somehow they fly at the same
direction even though its not clear how they can communicate their
direction with one another.That has surprised many people,including us,
said MIT physics professor Gunther Roland,whose group led the analysis
of the collision data along with Wei Li,an assistant professor at Rice
University.
The MIT heavy-ion group saw the same distinctive pattern
in proton-proton collisions about two years ago.The same flight pattern
is also seen when ions of lead or other heavy metals,such as gold and
copper,collide with each other.Those heavy-ion collisions produce a wave
of quark gluon plasma,the hot soup of particles that existed for the
first few millionths of a second after the Big Bang.
In the
collider,this wave sweeps some of the resulting particles in the same
direction,accounting for the correlation in their flight paths.
It has been theorised that proton-proton collisions may produce a liquid-like wave of gluons,known as colour-glass condensate.
This
dense swarm of gluons may also produce the unusual collision pattern
seen in proton-lead collisions,said Raju Venugopalan,a senior scientist
at Brookhaven National Laboratory,who was not involved in the current
research.Venugopalan and colleagues theorised the existence of
colour-glass condensate shortly before the particle direction
correlation was seen in proton-proton collisions.The correlation is a
very tiny effect,but it's pointing to something very fundamental about
how quarks and gluons are arranged spatially within a proton,he
added.PTI
WASHINGTON: An undergraduate team from the Sardar Vallabhai Patel
Institute in Gujarat has been declared runner-up in the non-US category
of a NASA competition to design a supersonic airliner.
Named
"Rastofust", the design of the supersonic airliner was designed by Sahaj
Panchal and Dhrumir Patel, NASA said yesterday while announcing the
result of its contest.
The top slot in the non-US category was grabbed by students from the University of Tokyo, Japan.
College students from the US, Japan and India researched technology and
created concepts for a supersonic passenger jet as part of a
competition sponsored by the Fundamental Aeronautics Program in NASA's
Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate, NASA said.
The
participants were challenged to design a small supersonic airliner and
submit a research paper limited to 25 pages. Designs had to be
efficient, environmentally friendly, low sonic boom commercial aircraft
that could be ready for initial service by 2020.
A team of
undergraduates from the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and a
team of graduate students from the Georgia Institute of Technology in
Atlanta tied for first place in the US division, it said.
