New State of Matter Is 'Nearly Perfect' Liquid

[Dover]

New State of Matter Is 'Nearly Perfect' Liquid



Physicists working at Brookhaven National Laboratory announced today that they have created what appears to be a new state of matter out of the building blocks of atomic nuclei, quarks and gluons. The researchers unveiled their findings--which could provide new insight into the composition of the universe just moments after the big bang--today in Florida at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

There are four collaborations, dubbed BRAHMS, PHENIX, PHOBOS and STAR, working at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). All of them study what happens when two interacting beams of gold ions smash into one another at great velocities, resulting in thousands of subatomic collisions every second. When the researchers analyzed the patterns of the atoms' trajectories after these collisions, they found that the particles produced in the collisions tended to move collectively, much like a school of fish does. Brookhaven's associate laboratory director for high energy and nuclear physics, Sam Aronson, remarks that "the degree of collective interaction, rapid thermalization and extremely low viscosity of the matter being formed at RHIC make this the most nearly perfect liquid ever observed." ...cont'd

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=0006EA4B-28BC-1260-A8BC83414B7F0000

[Ian David]

1. How is this different from Einstein-Bose Condensate?

Asked and answered my own question.

For one thing, Bose-Einstein (or Einstein-Bose) is cold.
Quark-Glon is hot.

Neither are available at your pharmacy without a perscription.


October 16, 2001
Quantum Stew: How Physicists Are Redefining Reality's Rules
By GEORGE JOHNSON, The New York Times

<snip>

Because of their quantum nature, atoms (like the particles they are
made of) act like waves. The slower they move, the more stretched-out
they become, dropping in pitch like a musical note sliding down the
scale. Take a rarefied gas - atoms darting around in a container
- and cool it so that the motion becomes slower and slower. Each
atom's wavelength will widen until finally, as the temperature nears
absolute zero, they all overlap, forming an exotic substance called a
Bose-Einstein condensate. Imagine 2,000 billiard balls merging into
one.

More:
http://www.tqc.iu.edu/News/NYT_on_EB_condensates.htm

Also:
Bose-Einstein condensate
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Bose-Einstein condensate is a gaseous superfluid phase formed by atoms cooled to temperatures very near to absolute zero. The first such condensate was produced by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in 1995, using a gas of rubidium atoms cooled to 170 nanokelvins (nK). Under such conditions, a large fraction of the atoms collapse into the lowest quantum state, producing a superfluid.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose-Einstein_condensate

So, now we have:

Solid
Liquid
Gas
Plasma
Einstein-Bose Condensate
Something-almost-like-a-predicted-quark-gluon-plasma

Quark-gluon plasma
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Quark-gluon plasma is a superheated, high-density mass of quarks and gluons which is believed to have existed during the first 20 or 30 microseconds of the Universe's existence. In such a mass the conditions for asymptotic freedom would hold, and as a result, confinement would become irrelevant. This is believed to be the only way that free quarks could exist. It is named by analogy with traditional plasma in which normal bonds between electrons and nuclei are broken.

It is also called the deconfining phase of QCD.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark-gluon_plasma




Oh, wait. I found more:

Phase (matter)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

In the physical sciences, a phase is a set of states of a macroscopic physical system that have relatively uniform chemical composition and physical properties (i.e. density, crystal structure, index of refraction, and so forth.) The most familiar examples of phases are solids, liquids, and gases. Less familiar phases include plasmas and quark-gluon plasmas, Bose-Einstein condensates and fermionic condensates, strange matter, liquid crystals, superfluids and supersolids and the paramagnetic and ferromagnetic phases of magnetic materials.

Phases are sometimes called states of matter, but this term can lead to confusion with thermodynamic states. For example, two gases maintained at different pressures are in different thermodynamic states, but the same "state of matter".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_%28matter%29