{"id":152775,"date":"2022-12-13T21:23:37","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T03:23:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/particles-of-light-may-create-fluid-flow-data-theory-comparison-suggests"},"modified":"2022-12-13T21:23:37","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T03:23:37","slug":"particles-of-light-may-create-fluid-flow-data-theory-comparison-suggests","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/12\/particles-of-light-may-create-fluid-flow-data-theory-comparison-suggests","title":{"rendered":"Particles of light may create fluid flow, data-theory comparison suggests"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

A new computational analysis by theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Wayne State University supports the idea that photons (a.k.a. particles of light) colliding with heavy ions can create a fluid of \u201cstrongly interacting\u201d particles. In a paper just published in Physical Review Letters<\/i>, they show that calculations describing such a system match up with data collected by the ATLAS detector at Europe\u2019s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).<\/p>\n

As the paper explains, the calculations are based on the hydrodynamic particle flow seen in head-on collisions of various types of ions at both the LHC and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a DOE Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics<\/a> research at Brookhaven Lab. With only modest changes, these calculations also describe flow patterns<\/a> seen in near-miss collisions, where photons<\/a> that form a cloud around the speeding ions collide with the ions in the opposite beam.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe upshot is that using the same framework we use to describe lead<\/a>-lead and proton-lead collisions, we can describe the data of these ultra-peripheral collisions where we have a photon colliding with a lead nucleus,\u201d said Brookhaven Lab theorist Bjoern Schenke, a co-author of the paper. \u201cThat tells you there\u2019s a possibility that in these photon-ion collisions, we create a small dense strongly interacting medium that is well described by hydrodynamics\u2014just like in the larger systems.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new computational analysis by theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s Brookhaven National Laboratory and Wayne State University supports the idea that photons (a.k.a. particles of light) colliding with heavy ions can create a fluid of \u201cstrongly interacting\u201d particles. In a paper just published in Physical Review Letters, they show that calculations describing such [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-152775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}