Gold-on-gold nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory create a
Question:
Gold-on-gold nuclear collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory create a quark-gluon plasma with an energy density of about \(4 \mathrm{GeV} / \mathrm{fm}^{3}\); see Adare et al. (2010). Treat nuclear matter as composed of a noninteracting relativistic gas of quarks and gluons. Include the low-mass up and down quarks and their antiparticles (all spin \(-\frac{1}{2}\) ) and spin-1 massless gluons. Like photons, the gluons are bosons, have two spin states each, and are their own antiparticle. There are eight varieties of gluons that change the three color states of the quarks. Only the strongly interacting particles need to be considered due to the tiny size of the plasmas. What is the temperature of the quark-gluon plasma?
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