A Brief Summary Of Alice

At CERN in Geneva there is an ongoing experiment called ALICE (an acronym for `A Large Ion Collider Experiment`) that involves the teamwork of more than 1500 physicists from over 37 countries.

The experiment inside the collider attempts to solve many questions, such as: `Why do protons and neutrons weigh 100 times more than the quarks they are made up of?` And `Can these quarks that larger particles are composed of be freed?` As quarks always travel in pairs or threes (the energy it takes to separate them creates enough energy to create two more to join back up with the `separated` quarks, thus nullifying the effort), this research could change the face of particle physics.

How does the experiment work? By colliding beams of lead nuclei and generating a temperature roughly 100,000 times hotter than centre of the sun. As the nuclei collide, the extreme conditions present just after the big bang are re-created, causing the protons and neutrons to break apart or `melt` thereby freeing the quarks from the gluons that hold them together to create larger particles such as protons or neutrons. This state of quarks and gluons being somewhat-free is known as `quark-gluon plasma`.

After the collision when the quark-gluon plasma is created, it expands and cools. This is what is mainly studied in ALICE, as the expansion and cooling gives an insight into how the big bang may have formed our universe, on a much smaller scale: as the quark-gluon plasma expands and cools, the quarks and gluons join back together again to make hadrons, protons, neutrons, etc... These then join to form heavier particles, such as those that our universe is composed of.

In addition, the quark-gluon plasma also presents itself as the key to solving key issues faced by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), a theory that hypothesizes that interactions involving the strong force are governed by the colour charge of the involved quarks. The experiment sheds light on more complex ideas such as colour confinement (the phenomenon of particles with a ` colour charge` such as quarks being unable to be isolated and therefore unable to be observed in any further levels below that of the hadron) and chiral symmetry, both of which are strongly associated with the strong force created by the gluon field upon attempted nuclei component separation and therefore both contributing to a better understanding of the primordial matter from whence the universe emerged, as the experiment mimics to the best of modern ability the conditions 10^-6 of a second after the big bang- in more recent terms the experiments conducted may also provide a glimpse into the centre of collapsing neutron stars. lt;/span>