First indirect evidence of so-far undetected strange baryons
Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - 09:24
in Physics & Chemistry
(Phys.org) —New supercomputing calculations provide the first evidence that particles predicted by the theory of quark-gluon interactions but never before observed are being produced in heavy-ion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a facility that is dedicated to studying nuclear physics. These heavy strange baryons, containing at least one strange quark, still cannot be observed directly, but instead make their presence known by lowering the temperature at which other strange baryons "freeze out" from the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) discovered and created at RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility located at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory.