Quark-Gluon plasma density

[mathematic]

Is there an upper limit to the density of a quark-gluon plasma? If so, what is it? I believe this is the densest possible form of matter. If it isn't, what is?

[Sensei]

Quark-gluon plasma is theoretical state.

Never observed or produced by humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma

 

Read about Oh-My-God particle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh-My-God_particle

 

If it's proton, it has velocity c minus 1.5 femtometers.

40 million times more energy than particles made by currently existing particle accelerators.

15 such particles were detected in history.

[ajb]

Quark matter is not very well understood nor is the QCD phase diagram. You may find some answers to your question in (but I have not looked myself)

 

 

M. A. Stephanov, QCD phase diagram: an overview ,PoS LAT2006:024, 2006 (arXiv:hep-lat/0701002)

 

and/or

 

S. Hands, The Phase Diagram of QCD, Contemp.Phys.42:209-225,2001 (arXiv:physics/0105022 [physics.ed-ph])

Edited October 11, 2013 by ajb

[StringJunky]

Quark-gluon plasma is theoretical state.

Never observed or produced by humans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark%E2%80%93gluon_plasma

Not so and the heading on the Wiki article states it's out of date.

 

 

A superhot substance recently made in the Large Hadron Collider (pictures) is the densest form of matter ever observed, scientists announced this week.

Known as a quark-gluon plasma, the primordial state of matter may be what the entire universe was like in the immediate aftermath of the big bang.

The exotic material is more than a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and is denser than a neutron star, one of the densest known objects in the universe.

"Besides black holes, there's nothing denser than what we're creating," said David Evans, a physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and a team leader for the LHC's ALICE detector, which helped observe the quark-gluon plasma.

"If you had a cubic centimeter of this stuff, it would weigh 40 billion tons."

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2011/05/110524-densest-matter-created-lhc-alice-big-bang-space-science/

[imatfaal]

There is a nice page here at the RHIC at Brookhaven

http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/physics.asp

 

RHIC collides two beams of gold ions head-on when they're traveling at nearly the speed of light (what physicists call relativistic speeds). The beams travel in opposite directions around RHIC's 2.4-mile, two-lane "racetrack." At six intersections, the lanes cross, leading to an intersection. When ions collide at such high speeds fascinating things happen.

If conditions are right, the collision "melts" the protons and neutrons and, for a brief instant, liberates their constituent quarks and gluons. Just after the collision, thousands more particles form as the area cools off. Each of these particles provides a clue as to what occurred inside the collision zone. Physicists sift through those clues for interesting information.

 

and an explanation from Cern as well

 

 

http://home.web.cern.ch/about/physics/heavy-ions-and-quark-gluon-plasma

 

 

For a few millionths of a second, shortly after the big bang, the universe was filled with an astonishingly hot, dense soup made of all kinds of particles moving at near light speed. This mixture was dominated by quarks – fundamental bits of matter – and by gluons, carriers of the strong force that normally “glue” quarks together into familiar protons and neutrons and other species. In those first evanescent moments of extreme temperature, however, quarks and gluons were bound only weakly, free to move on their own in what’s called a quark-gluon plasma.

To recreate conditions similar to those of the very early universe, powerful acceleratorsmake head-on collisions between massive ions, such as gold or lead nuclei. In these heavy-ion collisions the hundreds of protons and neutrons in two such nuclei smash into one another at energies of upwards of a few trillion electronvolts each. This forms a miniscule fireball in which everything “melts” into a quark-gluon plasma.