'Perfect liquid' quark-gluon plasma is the most vortical fluid
Wednesday, August 2, 2017 - 12:22
in Physics & Chemistry
Particle collisions recreating the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that filled the early universe reveal that droplets of this primordial soup swirl far faster than any other fluid. The new analysis of data from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) - a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility for nuclear physics research at Brookhaven National Laboratory - shows that the "vorticity" of the QGP surpasses the whirling fluid dynamics of super-cell tornado cores and Jupiter's Great Red Spot by many orders of magnitude, and even beats out the fastest spin record held by nanodroplets of superfluid helium.