Abstract

Now imagine that this accelerated gold nucleus has a head-on collision with a second nuclear pancake, a gold nucleus accelerated to the same ultra-relativistic velocity but in the opposite direction. Momentarily, the two pancakes in this light-speed head-on collision will overlap. The masses of the nuclei have been increased by a factor of 108, and the mass of each is contained in a volume that has been reduced by a factor of 108. As a result, neglecting the fuzzing effects of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the instantaneous density of..