Physicists from CERN claim that they managed to accidentally create at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) a quark-gluon plasma, the matter of the Big Bang. The results of these experiments were published in the journal Nature Physics.
“We are very pleased with this discovery. We have a new opportunity to study matter in its primary state. The ability to study quark-gluon plasma under simpler and more convenient conditions, such as proton collisions, opens up a whole new dimension for us of how we can study how the universe behaved during and before the Big Bang,”said Federico Antinori (Federcio Antinori), official representative of the ALICE collaboration within the LHC.
The so-called quark-gluon plasma, or "quagma", is matter, "disassembled" into tiny particles - quarks and gluons, usually held inside protons, neutrons and other particles by strong nuclear interactions. For the "release" of quarks and gluons, gigantic temperatures and energies are needed, which, as scientists today believe, existed in nature only at the time of the Big Bang.
About ten years ago, physicists figured out that such conditions can be created by colliding sufficiently heavy ions with each other using powerful particle accelerators. For a long time, scientists believed that quagma could not be obtained in any other way, but last year they saw the first signs that this was not the case when they studied the results of the latest experiments on the CMS detector in the LHC. It turned out that the "primary matter of the Universe" is formed by collisions of single protons and lead ions.
Antinori and his colleagues found that a kind of quagma analog also occurs when protons collide with each other, studying the data collected by the ALICE detector after restarting the LHC in April 2015 to the present day.
Protons and neutrons are made up of two types of subatomic particles - "down" (d) and "up" (u) quarks. There are four other types of quarks - adorable (b), enchanted (©), strange (s), and true (t). They form the basis of exotic forms of matter and do not exist in nature in a stable form. All these quarks, as scientists say, can form only in the presence of "free" gluons, inside a quark-gluon plasma.
As observations at ALICE showed, the collision of protons with each other often led to the appearance of microscopic "clouds" of quark-gluon plasma - a "soup" of quarks and gluons from destroyed protons, heated to unimaginably high temperatures - about four trillion degrees Celsius. Its traces in the form of particles containing the so-called "strange" quarks were recorded by the detector in large quantities.
Interestingly, particles with a large number of "strange" quarks appeared more often than other products of proton collisions. Scientists believe that this indicates the unusual circumstances of their birth associated with the conditions that reigned inside the quark-gluon plasma at the time of its formation.
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This, in their opinion, suggests that the properties of the "quagma" can be studied using collisions of protons that are "convenient" for physicists, rather than complex heavy ions, which will bring us closer to understanding how the Universe looked before and during the Big Bang.