Testing onestory model - DavidN x 4320
Scientists using a giant atom smasher say they have created a new state of matter that shows what the early universe once looked like.
Physicist Dr Sam Aronson from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, says for a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang all was in the form of this hot, dense liquid made out of basic atomic particles and called a quark-gluon plasma.
"We have a new state of matter," says Aronson, who was speaking from a meeting of the American Physical Society.
"We think we are looking at a phenomenon ... in the universe 13 billion years ago when free quarks and gluons ... cooled down to the particles that we know today."
The findings, detailed in four separate studies, will be published in the journal Nuclear Physics A.
The quark-gluon plasma was made in the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, a powerful atom smasher.
Unexpectedly, the quark gluon plasma behaved like a perfect liquid of quarks, instead of a gas, the physicists said.
For their experiment, the researchers smashed two gold ions together at extremely high speeds, very close to the speed of light.
The collision was so intense that the strong force that usually binds quarks into protons and neutrons weakened, allowing the quarks to roam freely.
Normally quarks, the most basic particles that make up matter, are bound together and cannot be measured directly.
At temperatures 10,000 times hotter than those found inside the Sun and with just a few thousand particles, the nuclear physicists expected the quarks to fly around freely like a gas.
Instead, the quarks behaved like a perfect liquid, flowing together like a school of fish, without turbulence or random motion.
In contrast, a drop of water containing the same number of particles would not behave like a liquid at all, but just fly apart.
"This is fluid motion that is nearly perfect," says Aronson.
A glimpse of the beginning of time
Dr Raymond Orbach, director of the US energy department's Office of Science, which funds the collider, says the finding is stunning.
"That the new state of matter created in the collisions of gold ions is more like a liquid than a gas gives us a profound insight into the earliest moments of the universe," he says.
The unexpected results have a link to another field of physics, called string theory.
String theory attempts to explain properties of the universe using 10 dimensions, instead of the three space and one time dimension that humans commonly perceive.
The string theory calculation describing how gravity behaves near a black hole can also explain how quarks move in a quark gluon plasma, experts say.