John Hill and Fred Wohn, professors of physics at Iowa State, are trying to find out when and what the universe was like at the moment of its birth.

They have formed a team of ISU physicists and Ames Lab engineers who, along with scientists from around the world, are working though the U.S. Department of Energy. In 1999 they will attempt to recreate, in a Long Island tunnel, the conditions of the universe at its birth.

“At the beginning,” Hill said, “the universe was so hot that matter as we know it could not exist, but was in the form of a hot ‘soup’ of its basic components called a quark gluon plasma. This plasma quickly expanded, cooled and condensed into the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up today’s universe.”

In their experiment, the scientists will start with ordinary matter and attempt to go backwards to make a quark gluon plasma. If the plasma is produced it will be possible to learn new information about “strong” force, a force that holds nuclei together and is one of the four basic forces that governs the behavior of the physical universe.

One way to make the plasma of quarks and gluons would be to try to heat up ordinary matter.

“Unfortunately, the heat needed would have to be hotter than the center of a hydrogen bomb,” Hill said, “and this could not be generated by conventional means.”

“The way we will do it,” Wohn said, “is to use a new particle accelerator called RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) to accelerate two counter rotating beams of gold nuclei to almost the speed of light.”

Some of the collisions in which the gold nuclei collide head-on should produce the quark gluon plasma. The plasma will then expand, cool and condense into ordinary matter allowing scientists to chart the evolution of the early universe, Wohn said.

Wohn said a detector called PHENIX will be used to search for signals of the plasma. Wohn is on the PHENIX Detector Council that oversees the design and construction of the detector.

It is a device the size of a large four-story house that watches the collisions of the gold nuclei and detects and analyzes the thousands of particles produced in most collisions. The gold beams collide 10 million times each second but most of the collisions will be saved for detailed study.

“Such a project comes under the category of ‘big science’ and is very expensive,” Wohn said.

The RHIC accelerator is the top priority project for the Department of Energy nuclear physics and will cost $487 million. It is being built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. The PHENIX detector will cost $96 million, $2.5 million of which supports the work of the Ames Lab electronics engineers Harold Skank, Bill Thomas and Gary Sleege.

The PHENIX Collaboration is an international group of 400 scientists from all over the world including Japan, Russia and China.

“It is a truly international project,” Hill said, “with major contributions of money and material from aboard.”

“There is a lot of work yet to do before we can begin taking data in 1999 when the first gold beams will be accelerated at RHIC,” Wohn said, “but the chance to study the quark gluon plasma and the nature of the strong force makes it all worthwhile.”