Iowa State physicists are helping to devise an experiment they hope will allow them to peer back more than 12 billion years and “see” what the universe looked like seconds after the Big Bang.

Working with Brookhaven National Laboratories in New York, the ISU scientists will collide gold nuclei (atoms stripped of their electrons) with the hope of creating a never-before-seen nuclear material called quark-gluon plasma.

“The quarks and gluons are the basic constituents of matter,” said John Hill, professor of physics and astronomy. “A microsecond after the Big Bang, the whole universe was in the form of this quark-gluon plasma.”

Colliding the nuclei at nearly the speed of light will create extremely intense temperatures. This will send the nuclei through what Hill called a “phase transition.”

“With temperatures a billion times hotter than the surface of our sun, protons and neutrons of atomic nuclei will melt back into their bizarre building blocks — the quarks and the gluons that hold the quarks together,” he said.

Observing what happens as this plasma cools will allow scientists to understand how protons and neutrons originally were formed after the Big Bang, he said.

“As the universe expanded and cooled, the plasma went through a phase transition of unknown character, resulting in the formation of neutrons and protons, which led much later to the formation of atoms and life as we know it,” he said.

Hill said you can never really get a glimpse of the plasma.

“You never actually see the plasma itself. You only see the stuff it condenses into,” he said.

Hill compared the process to the condensation of steam. Steam represents the plasma, and the water droplets that form when it condenses represent protons and neutrons.

The ISU group works on the Phenix detector, which is part of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven. Beginning in 1992, they designed, built and will maintain the first-level trigger, which is responsible for determining which of more than 100,000 collisions per second they will keep to analyze.

The scientists look for unusual particles and interactions that indicate the quark-gluon plasma did indeed form, said John Lajoie, assistant professor of physics.

“What distinguishes Phenix is the ability to look for rare signals for the quark-gluon plasma,” he said.

The detector is a series of sophisticated electronics and massive magnets that is about the size of a two-story house, Lajoie said.

“It’s the kind of thing that could only be built by a large collaboration of people,” he said.

Hill said more than 400 people work on the project. Expert engineers in microelectronics at Ames Lab made it possible for ISU to play such a large role in the project.

RHIC is scheduled to be operational by January, but Hill said it probably will not begin work until March. Scientists will then be able to start analyzing data.

“My goal is to actually work on the physics,” said Marzia Rosati, assistant professor of physics.

Rosati has been working on developing software for the detector that will look at the properties of the collisions and help explore the physics of quark-gluon plasma.

Lajoie said the project is exciting for everyone involved.

“You are taking a snapshot, a baby picture, of the universe when it was 10 microseconds old,” he said.