Columbia Science Review
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Team
  • Blog
  • Events
    • 2022-2023
    • 2021-2022
    • 2020-2021
    • 2019-2020
    • 2018-2019
    • 2017-2018
    • 2016-2017
  • Publications
  • COVID-19 Public Hub
    • Interviews >
      • Biology of COVID-19
      • Public Health
      • Technology & Data
    • Frontline Stories >
      • Healthcare Workers
      • Global Health
      • Volunteer Efforts
    • Resources & Links >
      • FAQ's
      • Resource Hubs
      • Student Opportunities
      • Podcasts & Graphics
      • Mental Health Resources
      • Twitter Feeds
      • BLM Resources
    • Columbia Events >
      • Campus Events
      • CUMC COVID-19 Symposium
      • CSR Events
    • Our Team
  • Contact

The Big Bang’s Favorite Soup

3/27/2021

0 Comments

 
Picture
Illustrated by Kate Steiner
By Ethan Feng
​

What happens to matter when it gets extremely hot? And how can this tell us more about the birth of the universe?

Let’s start with the basics. Chemistry 101 teaches us that temperature is a measure of how quickly microscopic particles are moving. At relatively low temperatures, matter exists in the solid state because molecules do not move much, due to the electrostatic intermolecular forces that bind them together strongly. As the temperature rises more and more, the molecules move faster, and these intermolecular forces struggle to hold molecules tightly in place. This allows them to move with more freedom—giving rise first to the liquid state, where intermolecular forces still hold some influence, and then to the gaseous state, where the forces have been overwhelmed essentially completely.

These comprise what we typically learn as the three “standard” states of matter—but this is only the tip of the temperature-iceberg. When matter gets much hotter (which it can), not only are the intermolecular forces overwhelmed, but so are the Coulombic forces that tether electrons to their nuclei as the attraction between positive and negative charges is no longer enough to resist the subatomic particles’ increased energy. This causes electrons to be ejected from atoms, giving rise to a cloud of unbound electrons that surround the remaining positively charged ions. We call this plasma, often referred to as the fourth state of matter, and it is what lightning bolts and neon light signs are made of.

Perhaps you’re noticing a theme here: as temperatures rise, forces that are normally strong enough to bind particles together get overwhelmed, causing structures of particles to break apart, thereby allowing free particles to move around with ever-increasing disorder. Indeed, this trend continues if we crank up the temperature even further.

Heat matter up enough, and eventually, even the forces that hold the protons and neutrons within the nucleus concede, giving rise to a chaotic sea of free subatomic particles. But even that is not the end…

Before we continue, we must give a brief review of particle physics. Each particle within an atomic nucleus (i.e., a proton or a neutron) is further composed of three smaller subatomic particles, called quarks. To the best of science’s current understanding, quarks are the most fundamental, indivisible building blocks of matter in the universe. These quarks are held together extremely tightly by force-carrying particles called gluons—so strongly that, under ordinary circumstances, it is virtually impossible to pull the quarks apart.

But at extraordinary temperatures on the order of five trillion degrees Celsius, even the strong force that binds quarks together must yield: under such extreme conditions, the quarks and gluons within individual protons and neutrons are ripped apart. This gives rise to a chaotic mélange of freely flowing, unbound quarks and gluons—appropriately named quark-gluon soup. In it, no molecules, no atoms, and no protons or neutrons can exist—only a structureless sea of the individual elementary particles that usually comprise them, unable to combine to form anything greater because the enormous temperatures overwhelm any attempt at bonding.

Such an outrageous state of matter rarely arises in the universe because the conditions required to create it are so extreme—but that doesn’t mean scientists haven’t found a way to make it. Making quark-gluon soup requires the aid of a particle accelerator, such as the famous Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. Thanks to ingenious engineering, the apparatus can accelerate particles close to the speed of light; once they are fast enough, the collider smashes two high-speed particles into one another. The massive kinetic energy of the particles generates enormous temperatures during the collision and causes the particles to literally melt into a quark-gluon soup. 
​

One intriguing fact is that, while performing such experiments, the temperatures generated are measured to be comparable to the temperature of the universe during the Big Bang! Hence, physicists hypothesize that in the fraction of time immediately after the Big Bang, before ordinary matter came to be, the entire universe was a quark-gluon soup. Then, as the universe rapidly expanded and cooled off, in the blink of an eye, the quarks agglomerated to form matter as we know it. 
​

Retracing the story of the nascent universe is perhaps one of the most prominent unfinished tasks in physics. For example, scientists do not yet know how the first quarks and gluons assembled into the protons and neutrons we know. Without an understanding of this mechanism, it remains difficult to construct a complete picture of the universe’s development immediately after the big bang. So, scientists are currently using particle accelerators to study the free quarks and gluons in quark-gluon soup, trying to characterize their transition into larger particles. Progress, however, is difficult—even with the incredible available technology, particle accelerators are still only able to generate minuscule droplets of quark-gluon soup that only exist for a tiny fraction of a second before cooling off into larger particles. Some accelerators are currently undergoing upgrades that will allow them to generate bigger, longer-lived droplets of quark-gluon soup for better observation. Given these challenges, physicists remain hard at work, hoping to answer long-standing questions about how our universe began.
​

Many thanks to Professor Helen Caines at Yale, whose lecture during the YYGS program in 2018 inspired this article.


0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Artificial Intelligence
    Halloween 2022
    Winter 2022-2023

    Archives

    April 2024
    January 2024
    February 2023
    November 2022
    October 2022
    June 2022
    January 2022
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    October 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    November 2017
    October 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    April 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    July 2009
    May 2009

Columbia Science Review
© COPYRIGHT 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Photos from driver Photographer, BrevisPhotography, digitalbob8, Rennett Stowe, Kristine Paulus, Tony Webster, CodonAUG, Tony Webster, spurekar, europeanspaceagency, Christoph Scholz, verchmarco, rockindave1, robynmack96, Homedust, The Nutrition Insider
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Team
  • Blog
  • Events
    • 2022-2023
    • 2021-2022
    • 2020-2021
    • 2019-2020
    • 2018-2019
    • 2017-2018
    • 2016-2017
  • Publications
  • COVID-19 Public Hub
    • Interviews >
      • Biology of COVID-19
      • Public Health
      • Technology & Data
    • Frontline Stories >
      • Healthcare Workers
      • Global Health
      • Volunteer Efforts
    • Resources & Links >
      • FAQ's
      • Resource Hubs
      • Student Opportunities
      • Podcasts & Graphics
      • Mental Health Resources
      • Twitter Feeds
      • BLM Resources
    • Columbia Events >
      • Campus Events
      • CUMC COVID-19 Symposium
      • CSR Events
    • Our Team
  • Contact