LHC Creates Cosmic Primordial Soup and Probes Strange Particle Jets
Posted: Wed Dec 01, 2010 9:36 am
"Now that the Large Hadron Collider is smashing lead, the discoveries are coming fast and furious.
Earlier this month CERN’s smashing machine switched from sending protons zinging around its ring to sending heavy lead ions at relativistic speeds. Those energetic collisions, the physicists now say, have allowed them to use the LHC’s ALICE experiment to glimpse quark-gluon plasma, the “primordial soup” present just after the Big Bang.
During this time, the Universe would have been so hot and energetic that the particles making up the elements we know today were unable to form, leaving the constituents to float “free” as a primordial soup. Quarks and gluons were only able to condense into larger particles when universal energy conditions were low enough. Hadrons (i.e. particles made from quarks; including baryons like neutrons and protons) were only allowed to form 10-6 seconds after the Big Bang.
In addition to creating the plasma, the CERN experiments have also shown they have the ability to probe the jets of particles that stream away from an energetic collision, and those jets could hold hints about the beginnings of the universe."
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