The quark-gluon plasma, 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 ALICE team obtained new results by replacing lead — usually used for collisions — with xenon.
“Xenon is a ‘smaller’ atom with fewer nucleons in its nucleus,” they explained.
“When colliding ions, we create a fireball that recreates the initial conditions of the Universe at temperatures in excess of several thousand billion degrees.”
“In contrast to the Universe, the lifetime of the droplets of the quark-gluon plasma produced in the laboratory is ultra short, a fraction of a second.”
“Under these conditions the density of quarks and gluons is very high and a special state of matter is formed in which quarks and gluons are quasi-free, dubbed the strongly interacting quark-gluon plasma.”
The experiments revealed that the primordial matter, the instant before atoms formed, behaved like a liquid that can be described in terms of hydrodynamics.
To read more, click here.