The early universe was a fluid quark-gluon plasma | You Zhou

Fig. 1 [Left] An event from the first Xenon-Xenon collision at the Large Hadron Collider at the top energy of the Large Hadron Collider (5.44 TeV ) registered by ALICE [credit: ALICE]. Every colored track (The blue lines) corresponds to the trajectory of a charged particle produced in a single collision; [right] formation of anisotropic flow in relativistic heavy-ion collisions due to the geometry of the hot and dense overlap zone (shown in red color). Credit: Niels Bohr Institute

Oct. 5, 2018 (Phys.org) -- Scientists from the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, and their colleagues from the international ALICE collaboration recently collided xenon nuclei, in order to gain new insights into the properties of the Quark-Gluon Plasma (the QGP) -- the matter that the universe consisted of up to a microsecond after the Big Bang.

The QGP, as the name suggests, is a special state consisting of the fundamental particles, the quarks, and the particles that bind the quarks together, the gluons.

The result was obtained using the ALICE experiment at the 27 km long superconducting Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

The result is now published in Physics Letters B.

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