Charmed Existence: Mysterious Particles Could Reveal Mysteries of the Big Bang

[Judi Lynn]

By Jesse Emspak, Live Science Contributor | June 6, 2017 06:42am ET



A mysterious particle created in a blazing fireball at an atom smasher is misbehaving, a new experiment shows.

The particle, called a charm quark, revealed surprising interactions with its neighboring subatomic particles, measurements show. That discovery could improve scientists' understanding of the conditions that existed soon after the Big Bang, when the universe was permeated by a primordial soup of elementary particles, and possibly show hints of physics beyond what scientists know today. [Wacky Physics: The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

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The surprising charm-quark behavior was first spotted at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Upton, New York, which aims to recreate conditions in the trillionths of a second after the Big Bang. The key to the new observation is the Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT), a set of recently installed ultrasensitive photodetectors similar to those in digital cameras. Using the HFT, for the first time, researchers directly measured the behavior of charm quarks as they emerged from the trillion-degree fireball meant to recreate the universe's first moments.

To recreate these primeval conditions, the RHIC fires gold atoms at one another at nearly the speed of light. As they collide, the atoms break up into a soup of elementary, free-flowing particles known as a quark-gluon plasma. Quarks make up more familiar particles, like protons and neutrons, while gluons are the carriers of the strong nuclear force that holds the quarks together.

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[Thor_MN]

1. Ixnay on the oldgay!!!

Someone is going to have a sh!t hemorrhage if he finds out they are destroying gold...