Who says particle physics has lost its zing?
Ten years in the making, Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is the world’s most powerful particle accelerator; when the Long Island, New York, facility (www.rhic.bnl.gov) fires up this month, it should vastly increase our understanding of the moments immediately following the Big Bang. That’s the good news. If everything goes right -please – RHIC should work like this: Near-light-speed collisions will smash gold ions into their component protons and neutrons, producing superintense heat that melts the particles into a soup of quarks and gluons. Quarks are the most basic unit of matter; under ordinary conditions, they never exist freely but are bound into larger particles by gluons. In the collider’s high-pressure, high-energy conditions, the quarks and gluons form a plasma, known as QGP, believed to have existed at the birth of the universe. Some scientists – among them Frank Wilczek of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey – have said
