When Albert Einstein formulated the special theory of relativity he also thought up something called the color glass condensate. This wonderfully named form of matter should be hidden inside of extremely energetic protons and heavy atomic cores.
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Einstein's special theory of relativity predicts many things. Some of them aren't even mysterious for current science. But others are still like ghosts to us. Elusive. One of the ghosts of special relativity is a unique form of matter that has been defying us for more than a decade. Now the largest device on Earth – the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) may be on the edge of discovering this awesome matter. We are talking about a type of matter which is named so mysteriously and psychedelically. It perfectly corresponds to the essence of the matter. Color glass condensate.
Interestingly, for once the scientists at the LHC aren't looking at matter collisions. Instead, they are watching particles that miss each other.
In the Standard Model of particle physicists, almost all visible matter is kept together by elementary particles known as gluons. Gluons (as their name suggests) are the glue that keeps quarks together allowing them to create protons and neutrons. But when you speed protons up to speeds close to the speed of light something strange happens. Gluons start multiplying in them.
Gluons in protons that were sped up split into pairs of lower energy gluons. And then those split. And so on and so on. At a certain point, the number of gluons inside the proton should get to a limit that it cannot exceed. And that is the point at which you get the color glass condensate. It should be a state of matter that is so far only hypothetical and should exist only in extremely energetic protons and in heavy atomic cores.
Physicists are convinced that color glass condensate should be capable of explaining several unsolved mysteries of current physics. For example, how new particles get created during high energy collisions or how exactly is matter distributed inside of particles. All we need to do now is find it.
Daniel Tapia Takaki – the research lead - and his team are using electrically charged particles. These particles – such as protons – create strong electromagnetic fields when they are sped up and release their energy in the form of high-energy photons. In the past, these photons were considered an unwanted by-product of speeding up particles. But now they are helping us find color glass condensate. The trick is – when extremely sped up protons miss by just the tiniest bit in the LHC they fly through a flock of high-energy photons and there is a chance that a photon and proton collide. When such a high-energy photon hits a proton various particles get created without the proton actually breaking up. The created particles are then detected by the LHCs detectors allowing the scientists to reconstruct the inside of the proton very precisely.
For the time the scientists are saying that recently they managed to indirectly measure the density of gluons inside a proton for the first time ever. And on the highest of energy levels, they see evidence that color glass condensate is starting to get created. But there are still many questions remaining to be answered. Thus, for the time being, color glass condensate is still an elusive ghost of special relativity.
Sources:
- https://www.livescience.com/lhc-could-find-einstein-missing-matter.html
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140%2Fepjc%2Fs10052-019-7202-9
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