Nuclear physicists can use the RHIC to see the shape and details of atomic nuclei. The method relies on particles of light that surround gold ion as they speed around the collider and a new type of quantumentanglement that has never been seen before.
The particles of light interact with the particles of gluons. The particles produced by those interactions decay into two different types of particles. The scientists can backtrack to get crucial information about the photon and use that to map out the arrangement of gluons within the nucleus with higher precision than before.
James Daniel Brandenburg, a member of the STAR collaboration who joined The Ohio State University as an assistant professor in January, said that the technique is similar to the way doctors use Positron Emission Tomography to see what's happening inside the brain and other body parts. In this case, we're talking about mapping out features on the scale of femtometers, which is the size of a single protons.
The observation of a completely new kind of quantum interference makes it possible for the physicists to make their measurements.
Even though they are distinguishable particles, interference patterns show that the particles are in contact, even though they are different.
The goal of mapping out the building blocks of matter might be beyond the scope of that discovery.
Many scientists, including those who won the 2022, are trying to harness the power of entangled particles. More powerful communication tools and computers are one goal. A recent demonstration of interference of lasers with different wavelength have been between the same electrons.
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The work is described in a journal.
There is a light shining on the ground.
The innermost building blocks of nuclear matter, the quarks and gluons, can be studied at RHIC. Heavy atoms such as gold are smashed together at close to the speed of light. Scientists can study the quarks and gluons as they existed in the very early universe if they can see the intensity of the ion collisions.
Nuclear physicists want to understand how quarks and gluons behave within atomic nuclei to better understand the force that holds them together.
A recent discovery using "clouds" of photons that surround RHIC's speeding ion suggests a way to see inside the nucleus. The internal structure of the other ion can be probed by the photons surrounding it.
The electric field from the center of the ion is reflected by the photon. The tool that we use to image the nucleus is the polarized light.
The newly analyzed data shows that the quantum interference between the + and can be very precise. Physicists can look at the gluon distribution along the direction of the photon.
It turns out to be very important.
When we didn't know the direction of the polarization, we used to measure the density of gluons as an average. There is a one-dimensional image.
When compared with what was predicted by theoretical models, the nucleus looked too big.
We were able to solve the 20-year mystery of why this happens with the use of 2D images.
The measurement shows that the energy of the photon and the gluons are different. A picture is distorted by these photon effects if you don't know what direction the photo is in. The measurement avoids the photon blur.
We can take a picture where we can see the density of gluons at a given angle. The images are so precise that we can see the differences between the protons and the neutrons.
The new pictures match up with the predictions of gluon distribution and the measurement of electric charge distribution within the nucleus.
The details of the measurement.
The particle created by the photon-gluon interaction is what the physicists use to make these 2D measurements. It decays very quickly, in less than a second, into the + and. The sum of the momenta of those two pions gives physicists information about the parent rho particle, as well as the photon blur effect.
Scientists measure the angle between the path of either the + or to get the gluon distribution. The less blur you get from the photon probe, the closer the angle is. Scientists can map out the gluon distribution across the nucleus by tracking pions that come from rho particles.
The evidence that the + and particles striking the STAR detector result from interference patterns produced by the entanglement of these two oppositely charged particles makes the measurements possible.
All the particles we are talking about are waves. The mathematical functions that describe the crests and troughs of particle waves can interfere with one another.
When the two near-miss speeding ion interact with the gluons inside the nucleus, it's as if they create two rho particles in each nucleus. The wave function of the negative pion from one decay interfered with the wave function of the negative pion from the other decay. The reinforced wavefunction strikes the STAR detector. The wavefunctions of the two positively charged pions can be seen by the detector.
The interference is between two wavefunctions of the identical particles, but without the entanglement between the two different particles. It's the weirdity of quantum mechanics.
The rhos could possibly be entangled. The rho particle wavefunctions can't interact with each other before they decay to + and. The wavefunctions of the + and are aware of each other despite hitting the detector meters apart.
The two wavefunctions would have a random phase if they were not entangled. We wouldn't see any orientation related to the photon polarization.
Future measurements at RHIC with heavier particles and different lifetimes will be used to probe more detailed distributions of gluons inside the nucleus.
James Brandenburg wrote about tomography of ultra-relativistic nuclei. www.science.org/
Journal information: Science Advances
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