NEW YORK -- Columbia University physicists have unveiled a powerful supercomputer that will be used to numerically simulate conditions that existed around the time of the Big Bang, the hypothesized explosive birth of the universe.
Last year, findings reported by two American scientists who analyzed radio waves from 160 distant galaxies discovered anomalies that suggested the expansion of the universe unleashed by the Big Bang was not uniform.
Columbia University physicists working on the supercomputer project said that when normal matter is heated to 3 trillion degrees Fahrenheit, particles called quarks and gluons become an ultra-hot gas known as a quark-gluon plasma. They believe this state existed at the time of the theorized Big Bang 10 billion years ago.
The project intends to simulate this condition by using one computer at its Manhattan campus working in tandem with a sister computer at Brookhaven National Laboratories on Long Island.
Physicists have turned to numerical simulations to study quarks and gluons, also known as strongly interacting particles. They are the least understood elements of the Standard Model, the prevailing physics theory that relates to all known or predicted forces or particles.
Physics professor Norman Christ said the problem was to try to learn something of the properties created in the plasma state.
"But of course, we're just doing a calculation; ultimately it's the experimental test that tells you if you really understand what's happening," Christ said.
Christ described the 5-year-long project as "a bit of an amateur effort" because much of the work was done by the university and graduate students as an academic enterprise that kept costs relatively low. The system cost less than US$4 million, considerably lower than the $50 million price of a commercial supercomputer operating at similar speeds, Columbia University said.
