Physics Club Seminar, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, CT, April 5, 2010
Richard T. Jones
University of Connecticut
According to standard cosmology, space in the very early universe was filled with a dense plasma of ionized matter that consisted among other things of free quarks, anti-quarks and gluons in thermal equilibrium with one another. As the universe cooled, a phase transition occurred which resulted in the near-disappearance of antiquarks and the confinement of left-over quarks inside atomic nuclei. What then happened to the gluons? The answer seems to be that they did not disappear, but merely used the quarks to "cloak" themselves inside nuclei. High-powered computer codes are now beginning to reveal how this cloaking takes place, and predict the existence of a new family of particles in which the cloaking is only partial. Experiments are now showing evidence for the existence of these particles, building confidence that this picture is correct.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0901016.