Researchers using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN are meeting in Annecy, France today to discuss the latest discoveries on a plasma of quarks and gluons, the fundamental building blocks of matter, that existed just microseconds after the Big Bang.
Berndt Mueller Physics professor, Duke University mueller@phy.duke.edu http://www.phy.duke.edu/~muller/ Quote:"The quark-gluon plasma, or 'quark matter,' produced in lead nuclei collisions at the LHC is about three times denser than the one created in collisions of gold nuclei at Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, but otherwise behaves very much in the same way, confirming our conclusions about the near perfect fluidity of this state of matter and its extreme power to degrade the energy of quarks and gluons. "The remarkable thing is that the quark matter created at RHIC and LHC at energies differing by more than a factor ten looks and behaves so amazingly similar."