SSS 2008-02-25（在线收听）

Transcript

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I am Cynthia Graber.This will just take a minute.

Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have  been able to send information ahead of  particle beams racing at nearly the speed of light.And the message to the beams is get in line. This technique has been developed at other labs but never used before with particle beams travelling in discrete bunches, these bunches are important and recreating that singular moment: the Big Bang.In these experiments, there are 2 different sets of ions electrically charged particals zooming towards each other around a 2.4 mile track. They collide into one another to recreate conditions that provide info about the Big Bang.But the ions spread out as they move and this means there are fewer collisions. In a technique called stochastic cooling.Scientists first measure fluctuations in the beams of ions, then they send signals even faster than these particles to devices up ahead that can kick those particles back into shape. Researchers say this technique allows them to create these collisions much more frequently and cheaply than other methods.And so they can get more and better data about what our universe might have been like just after it came into existence.

Thanks for the minute, for Scientific American's 60-Second Science, I am Cynthia Graber.