A flow of heavy-Ion results from the Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider shut down its proton beams on Nov. 4, 2010, and quickly began circulating beams of lead ions, a run scheduled to last a month. Within days, the first results from ALICE, the LHC experiment designed specifically to study heavy-ion collisions, were posted online. Two weeks after the start of the lead-lead run, CERN’s press office announced what it called “new insight into the primordial universe” from three LHC experiments, ALICE plus ATLAS and CMS. The latter are broad-coverage detectors which also have programs for investigating heavy-ion collisions. Finally the ALICE collaboration posted two more results, shortly before the LHC ended its lead-ion run on Dec. 6.