Large Hadron Collider Creates the ‘Littlest Liquid’ from the Big Bang

Researchers regarded that this was the only circumstance in which the plasma is generated. The researchers said that the discovery was the result of the collision between protons and lead nuclei at very high speeds inside the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid detector. “Analysis presented in paper indicates, contrary to expectations, quark-gluon plasma can be created in very asymmetric proton on lead collisions”, Wang said. A quark-gluon plasma occurs when the temperature is so high that individual protons and neutrons literally melt.

Tiny droplets of what are believed to be a state of matter that may have existed during the first few milliseconds after the occurrence of the Big Bang, were produced by a laboratory in the United States.

Although physicists have announced the detection of this exotic state of matter before, new results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York, appear to show the tiniest droplets of quark-gluon plasma appear, in a specific pattern, after colliding helium-3 nuclei with gold ions.

The collaboration between a group of researchers at the University of Kansas with an global team of scientists came into fruition after they have successfully reproduced the quark-gluon plasma. “The interplay between partons-quarks and gluons-inside the quark-gluon plasma is robust, which distinguishes the quark-gluon plasma from a gaseous state the place one expects little interplay among the many constituent particles”.

Experiments at RHIC and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), near Geneva, Switzerland, have been chasing the formation of this primordial state of matter for some time.

“This is probably the first evidence that the smallest droplet of quark gluon plasma is produced in proton-lead collisions”, said Yen-Jie Lee, assistant professor of physics at MIT and co-convener of the CMS heavy-ion physics group.

High-energy particle physics is something which focuses typically on detecting subatomic particles like the recently discovered Higgs Boson.

Wang said such experiments might help scientists to better understand cosmic conditions in the instant following the Big Bang. Since these initial discoveries, physicists have refined their accelerator experiments, colliding different ions together, producing different configurations of the quark-gluon plasma. “With the ability to type a in proton-lead collisions helps us to raised outline the circumstances wanted for its existence”.