Archive for June, 2012

This week we enjoy our very small piece of the ultimate prize one could ever hope to achieve.  Not the Nobel Prize, or a Fields Medal, or knighthood, or the Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.  Oh no.  This prize is better.  We at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider officially now hold the Guinness World Record for highest man-made temperature:

In February 2010, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider on Long Island, New York, USA, announced that they had smashed together gold ions at nearly the speed of light, briefly forming an exotic state of matter known as a quark-gluon plasma. This substance is believed to have filled the universe just a few microseconds after the Big Bang. During the experiment the plasma reached temperatures of around 4 trillionºC, some 250,000 times hotter than the centre of the Sun.

Fair enough, but what about the Large Hadron Collider?  Every expectation is that their lead-lead collisions will reach higher energies.  I like the explanation from the BNL Science Blog (the emphasis is mine):

But despite ALICE’s prowess, the collaboration has not published an official temperature measurement of its quark-gluon plasma, and the Guinness team is nothing if not official. For the time being, RHIC reigns, having driven physics forward by creating that revelatory multi-trillion degree matter many billions of times. But as with all records, RHIC’s Guinness is destined to be broken.

Enjoying it while it lasts,

-Dr. D

UPDATE:  The ACU press release is up at http://www.acu.edu/news/2012/120711-physics-guiness-world-record.html

Greetings!

It was almost hard to believe that another school year had come and gone already.  Before we knew it, we were triaging our schedules to figure out what had to be done before we left town and what would get put off a few more weeks months, packing up the car, and driving off to the lab.

This summer we’ve got two students at ACU doing phonon imaging with Dr. Head, four students smashing atoms at Brookhaven National Lab on Long Island in New York with Dr. Daugherity and Dr. Towell, four more students doing nuclear physics research at FermiLab near Chicago with Dr. Isenhower, two students working on a fission detector for NIFFTE at Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico and at Lawrence Livermore National Lab in California, and one student with Dr. Willis looking for gravity waves at the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany.   It is safe to say that this is one of our busiest summers ever!  (Hence the length of time it took me to get this post up…)  During this summer the sun never sets on ACU’s research.

There are lots of ways to talk about cutting-edge physics research.  There is the big picture overview of how we’re slowly unraveling the mysteries of the universe (and why that is worth our time and money).  There is the discussion on societal impact of how basic science research fuels technology growth, the economy, and (our primary focus) educating the next generation of people who will work in fields which haven’t even been invented yet.  Ultimately, this blog is about what ACU is doing in scientific research, so I’ll let most of our story this summer be told through the eyes of our students.

The day-to-day work of research is not likely what you would expect.  We rarely wear lab coats or safety goggles.  One day we’re writing code, the next day we’re soldering wires, the next day we’re going to a conference, or operating a $500 million detector, or (like today) building dams out of duct tape and styrofoam to keep the water away from our equipment during this torrential downpour.  We have high tech and low tech, exciting days and mundane days, and lots of setbacks for every breakthrough.

Here’s the first chapter of our story.  This is our first edition of our newsletter called the Doings ANd Goings On (DANGO) of ACU Physics Research:

DANGO 2012, Issue #1

-Dr. D