ALANNA GILLIS

amg7393@psu.edu

Opinions Editor

On Wednesday, January 26, students filled the auditorium seating of OBS 101 to hear Dr. Dustin Hemphill speak about quarks, gluons, and how they interacted to form the building blocks of life when the Big Bang occurred. 

The presentation seemed like it was targeted more toward people who had an advanced understanding of both Astronomy and Physics. However, it was discussed in such a way that the information was accessible even to people who did not have that heightened level of understanding. 

The focus of the presentation was on the way that quarks and gluons, particles that are both smaller than the electron, interact with one another, and how those interactions might have occurred seconds after the Big Bang. 

Hemphill stated that it takes an incredible amount of energy just to make quarks and gluons interact weakly; such weak interactions are the bare minimum that would have been necessary to form droplets of the early universe. It requires an incredibly high temperature and density to compress a nucleus enough for the protons and neutrons to overlap and “melt” with one another. The product of this interaction is called a phase transition, where the matter transitions between a state of a medium. Simply put, a phase transition is the movement of matter from one phase to another. 

Dr. Hemphill’s work focused on the quarks and gluons in this transitioned state. Experiments from the early 2000s involving the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, known as the RHIC, discovered behavior from these particles had completely unpredicted behavior when isolated. The Collider collides gold ions at the speed of light in order to generate subatomic reactions.

However, it is no simple task to discover and map new information about particles this small. Dr. Hemphill had to account for relativistic quantum dynamics. In high energy particle situations, there are two things that can occur. He explained that these two things are particle production and particle annihilation. 

“If you throw two quarks together and they have enough energy, they can form a third guy, a third quark.” This is called particle production. “If you have a lot of extra energy hanging around, then that can turn into a particle,” he explained. The opposite of particle production is particle annihilation, which is when three particles enter into an equation and two remain as the result. He also specified that the reasons for particle production versus annihilation are not entirely clear, and that it is an area many scientists are trying to further our understanding of. 

“The way we see these interactions is by collecting the data and projecting back what could have happened,” Hemphill explained. “You can’t see the collisions with your eyes, all you could see would be a flash of light.” 

Scientific knowledge was not the only knowledge Dr. Hemphill imparted on the audience that night. While talking about the scientific process of testing a hypothesis, he said “A good general thing, not just in science but in life, is to start with the simplest thing and go from there. Go one layer at a time.”