5 ms·

Anyone know how this compares to the NIF in terms of temperature? They talk about terawatts and megajoules versus degrees, and as a non-physics geek I can't equ

• aroberge 14y ago
  Nor should you (be able to equate the two). Very roughly speaking, temperature is akin to a measure of the average energy density. Joule is a measure of energy and watt is a measure of energy per unit time. So, they give you a measure of how fast they delivered the energy (in terawatts), how much energy was delivered (in megajoules) but this does not tell us anything about the temperature at which the sample was heated since we don't know the size of the target.
• jessriedel 14y ago
  The temperature at the LHC and RHIC are many orders of magnitude larger than at NIF. As aroberge mentions, temperature is roughly a measure of energy density. (Here, you should probably think of it as energy per particle rather than per spatial volume.) NIF is applying a large amount of energy to a small but macroscopic amount of matter. The LHC and RHIC are colliding mere nuclei, so the amount of matter is roughly 22 orders of magnitude less. The LHC and RHIC collisions are vastly higher temperature (energy per particle) than NIF, but the total energy is vastly less.