Winning the Ultimate Prize

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