A physics experiment at Iowa State aided in producing 15 billion-year-old matter thought to be produced by the big-bang.

A team of ISU physics professors, including John Hill, John Lajoie, Craig Ogilvie, Marzia Rosati and Fred Wohn, along with students, engineers and other ISU researchers, built a trigger that scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, NY. used in a series of experiments to create a matter called quark-gluon plasma.

The big-bang theory states after the big-bang occurred, the universe was believed to be composed of elementary particles called quarks and gluons, Hill said. These particles developed from temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun and lasted less than 10 seconds, he said.

After cooling, the quarks and gluons became protons and neutrons that make up a nucleus forming “clumps of matter” which the universe is made up of today, he said.

Rosati said the experiments are done with extreme accuracy, producing a smaller version of the big-bang. Quark-gluon plasma can not be seen by the naked eye, she said, but it would look like a mini fire which expands and cools.

Quark-gluon plasma was created by using Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where two beams of gold nuclei collide at about the speed of light, producing temperatures that have never been reached before, Hill said.

The trigger studied the effects of jets, said Obioma Ohia, sophomore in electrical engineering.

“[Jets are] streams of particles that are observed after the collision,” Ohia said.

Rosati said the trigger helped scientists decide which collisions are more promising to produce quark-gluon plasma.

The laboratory gives a sense of going back in time, into what the universe looked like at its birth, Hill said.

Ohia said these experiments will lead to an understanding of the first stages in the creation of the universe.

“We are in the age right now where we are putting the parts together,” Hill said.

The significance of these results could lead to a “creation story” of the universe, and one day produce an unlimited power source, he said.

In December, the scientists will begin working on new experiments using other kinds of particles to prove in two different ways the matter formed was quark-gluon plasma, Rosati said.

Hill said some of the goals for December are to produce good statistics and strong interaction.

Rosati said this research is exciting because these findings could lead to how all nuclear forms work. Students are excited because they are a part of something that has never been produced before, she said.