Explore the fascinating discovery of tiny droplets of the ‘perfect liquid’ being produced by the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. This groundbreaking research sheds new light on the origins of the universe and the fundamental building blocks of matter.
Revealing the Mystery of Quark-Gluon Plasma
The biggest and the most powerful particle accelerator, Home Hadron Collider — LHC has made stunning discoveries. Among the most recent discoveries is a candidate for the world’s smallest specks of an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state of matter thought to exist just microseconds after the Big Bang: quark-gluon plasma.
The quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is a state of matter that existed in the early universe immediately following the Big Bang. It is a liquid that contains the basic building blocks of matter – quark and gluons- which are usually imprisoned inside protons and neutrons. It is the state physicists are studying to help understand how the basic stuff of the universe, quarks and gluons, came to be.
An Unexpected Discovery
At the LHC, analysis of recent data has revealed the creation of quark-gluon plasma in collisions between photons and lead ions — a surprising result for the scientists involved. It was surprising as photons are usually low energy and cannot melt the protons and neutrons that compose the very large lead nuclei.
But add in a good deal of quantum physics and the researchers think these photon-ion collisions might be making something called the rho meson, which is an unstable particle made up of a quark and an antiquark bound together by gluons. That rho meson, if it were colliding with a lead ion, might have had enough energy to produce the quark-gluon plasma all by itself — one photon would not.
The flow of particles was observed to be distinctly elliptic, an important property related the quark-gluon plasma that was confirmed by the experimental data. Drawing from this work, theoretical physicists were able to adapt existing (published) calculations in order to detail photon-ion collisions as well… indicating even more strongly that small droplets of the ‘perfect liquid’ may indeed be forming in these unexpected interactions.
Conclusion
That the LHC may create minuscule bags of quark-gluon plasma could mean a seismic shift in how we model the subatomic materials nature is made from, even if those small bags are but a freak chance occurrence within collisions between light and heavy ions. This work is foundational, and future measurements will be able to provide more clues as to the beginning of everything, the elements that make up our universe at its most basic level.
