Twelve ISU researchers have joined an elite team of nuclear physicists to study an early stage of the universe known as “quark-gluon plasma.”

Using a detector called PHENIX, which was produced by researchers in Upton, N.Y., the ISU physicists study interactions of hundreds of particles that run into each other at high speeds in a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.

John Hill, a professor of physics and astronomy who is working on the project, said the $120 million detector is about three stories high, has the square footage of a mid-sized house and weighs 4,000 tons.

The collaboration includes 450 scientists from around the world. The lab where the ISU researchers are working has the largest of the four detectors.

“The idea of Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider is fairly simple,” said Nathan Grau, graduate student in nuclear physics. “We would like to create plasma.”

The particle collision creates temperatures a billion times hotter than the surface of the sun, which causes parts of atoms to separate into their basic parts.

Hill said the detector does not study plasma because it evaporates instantly. Instead, it detects “ordinary nuclear matter that results from the breakup of the plasma.”

He said it recreates the universe “a microsecond after the Big Bang.”

Researchers said data gathered from the PHENIX detector has produced interesting results.

Some also theorize that sometime during the quark-gluon plasma state, antiparticles and particles were found to coexist.

“We have results from RHIC where the ratio of antiprotons to protons is 0.6,” Hill said. “If it was just in the instance of the Big Bang it would be one.”

Marzia Rosati, associate professor of physics and astronomy, said this result confirms that an early stage of the universe was filled with matter and antimatter.