Quark Soup is back!

For those that aren't familiar, Quark Soup is a blog maintained by science journalist David Appell (regular Scientific America contributor). He went on hiatus for a while, but is back to work. Excellent source for coverage of science that you'll never see in the corporate, mainstream press. And he was a Dean supporter too!

http://www.davidappell.com/

Didn't know about this blog. I will visit it regularly.

Is the title a reference to a "quark plasma," a superheated gas inside collapsed stars which breaks protons into free quarks?

so I couldn't say if the blog title is a reference to quark plasma or not. Sounds resonable to me.


This is another science oriented blog with some quality coverage.

http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp#722

but it's as fascinating as ever. Look at this piece David Appell wrote in Sci Am. First I've heard of such a thing:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=5&articleID=0001D50C-406F-1052-BEB683414B7F0000

Shattered Glass
Seeking the densest matter: the color glass condensate
By David Appell

Physicists investigating heavy-particle collisions believe they are on the track of a universal form of matter, one common to very high energy particles ranging from protons to heavy nuclei such as uranium. Some think that this matter, called a color glass condensate, may explain new nuclear properties and the process of particle formation during collisions.

---snip

As protons or heavy nuclei, such as gold, are accelerated to nearly the speed of light, the quarks and gluons inside flatten into a pancakelike structure, a relativistic effect called Lorentz contraction. The energy of acceleration also produces more gluons. The flattened multitude of gluons then begins to overlap, falling into the same quantum state, similar to the way atoms in a low-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate overlap and behave collectively as one gigantic atom.

The color glass condensate can "shatter" in a collision. The shattering can produce a quark-gluon plasma, a bulk form of quarks and gluons.


PARTICLE SWARM resulting from a collision
between deuterons and gold ions might indicate
that a color glass condensate formed and then shattered.

I was hoping he would come back from his hiatus. As a fellow physicist, I consider his blog a "must read" just like Bob Parks "What's New" column at the American Physical Society website (www.aps.org).