Quantum quirk may reveal early universe

09 June 2007

NewScientist.com news service

Zeeya Merali

A TABLE-TOP experiment to mimic conditions in the early universe could steal some thunder from the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle smasher.

As the hot infant universe rapidly expanded, cosmologists believe that particles were created from the vacuum of empty space. To find out how, physicists generally use giant accelerators like the LHC - currently being built at CERN in Switzerland - to generate the kind of energies that existed soon after the big bang.

Now Ralf Schützhold at Dresden University of Technology in Germany and his colleagues are proposing a considerably cheaper and easier experiment. "We could potentially model the conditions of the universe at times stretching back beyond the reach of the LHC,"Schützhold claims.

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http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19426074.000?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19426074.000