{"id":117160,"date":"2025-09-03T16:46:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/117160\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T16:46:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T16:46:07","slug":"new-yorks-big-bang-machine-passes-critical-first-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/117160\/","title":{"rendered":"New York’s ‘Big Bang Machine’ Passes Critical First Test"},"content":{"rendered":"

We know very little about the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. We have theories, most of which we\u2019re still double- and triple-checking to see if they actually make scientific sense.<\/a> The research process can seem tedious at times, but a newcomer from Long Island offers promising advances in our quest to understand how our universe came to be.<\/p>\n

In a recent paper for the Journal of High Energy Physics<\/a>, researchers with the sPHENIX Collaboration announced that it had passed a \u201cstandard candle\u201d test with flying colors, correctly catching and measuring the energy level of colliding gold ions traveling close to the speed of light.<\/p>\n

The sPHENIX<\/a> detector is a 1,000-ton, two-story-tall instrument equipped with a powerful camera that catches and measures 15,000 particle collisions per second. It\u2019s the much-awaited upgrade to PHENIX, a now-retired detector at the Brookhaven National Laboratory\u2019s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC).<\/p>\n

\u201cThis indicates the detector works as it should,\u201d Gunther Roland, a physicist at MIT and the sPHENIX Collaboration, told MIT News<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s as if you sent a new telescope up in space after you\u2019ve spent 10 years building it, and it snaps the first picture. It\u2019s not necessarily a picture of something completely new, but it proves that it\u2019s now ready to start doing new science.\u201d<\/p>\n

The hot mess of the early universe <\/p>\n

Quarks and gluons are fundamental particles that make up protons and neutrons. Usually, these two particles are nearly impossible to pull apart, unless they\u2019re in an environment with extremely high temperatures and pressures\u2014such as the few microseconds immediately after the Big Bang.<\/p>\n

Under such conditions, quarks and gluons would have existed separately in a dense, soupy plasma known as the quark-gluon plasma<\/a> (QGP). The RHIC attempts to replicate these conditions by flinging particles in opposite directions. When some of these particles smash into one another, they release a gigantic load of energy that exists very briefly\u2014for a sextillionth of a second\u2014as QGP.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou never see the QGP itself\u2014you just see its ashes, so to speak, in the form of the particles that come from its decay,\u201d Roland said. \u201cWith sPHENIX, we want to measure these particles to reconstruct the properties of the QGP, which is essentially gone in an instant.\u201d<\/p>\n

The \u2018Big Bang machine\u2019 <\/p>\n

Passing the test bodes well for the detector\u2019s future. However, the team wants to put it through a few more quality checks. The sPHENIX detector is like a \u201cgiant 3D camera\u201d tracking the number, energy, and paths of particles generated by a single collision, the researchers said.<\/p>\n

\"SphenixA schematic of sPHENIX, a detector with precision particle tracking capabilities. Key components include outer and inner hadronic calorimeters, an electromagnetic calorimeter, tracking systems, and a superconducting solenoid magnet. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory <\/p>\n

\u201csPHENIX takes advantage of developments in detector technology since RHIC switched on 25 years ago to collect data at the fastest possible rate,\u201d Cameron Dean, a postdoctoral student at MIT and a member of the sPHENIX Collaboration, also told MIT News. \u201cThis allows us to probe incredibly rare processes for the first time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, the very features that make sPHENIX so impressive are also why it requires a lot of maintenance. But the researchers are hopeful they\u2019re on the right path. As of now, sPHENIX is busy collecting data for RHIC\u2019s 25th and final run<\/a>, after which the collider\u2019s successor, the Electric-Ion Collider, will take over.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fun for sPHENIX is just beginning,\u201d Dean said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We know very little about the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. We have theories, most of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117161,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[49,48,31991,820,314,25938,66],"class_list":{"0":"post-117160","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-early-universe","11":"tag-particle-physics","12":"tag-physics","13":"tag-quarks","14":"tag-science"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117160\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}