Physicists just saw quarks make waves in the Big Bang’s primordial soup
Physicists at CERN have observed quarks creating wake-like patterns in quark-gluon plasma, confirming that this primordial matter behaves like a dense liquid. This provides new insights into the conditions of the universe during its first microseconds.
Why it matters
Understanding the properties of quark-gluon plasma helps scientists reconstruct the evolution of the early universe and the fundamental nature of matter.
In the universe's earliest moments, temperatures reached trillions of degrees, creating an intensely hot mixture of quarks and gluons. These elementary particles raced around at nearly the speed of light in a state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma (QGP). This primordial material existed for only a few millionths of a second before cooling rapidly, allowing quarks and gluons to combine into protons, neutrons, and other particles found throughout the universe today.
At CERN's Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, physicists are recreating quark-gluon plasma to investigate the ingredients that filled the young universe. By colliding heavy ions at nearly the speed of light, researchers can briefly separate quarks and gluons and produce tiny amounts of the same kind of matter that existed during the universe's first microseconds.
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