Relativistic heavy-ion collisions constitute a research area focused on studying strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions of temperature and energy density by colliding heavy nuclei (such as Au or Pb) at relativistic energies in accelerators like RHIC and the LHC. The field aims to create and characterize the quark–gluon plasma, probing deconfinement, chiral symmetry restoration, and transport properties of QCD matter. It integrates experimental observables (e.g., flow coefficients, jet quenching, electromagnetic probes, strangeness enhancement) with relativistic hydrodynamics, lattice QCD, and effective theories to constrain the QCD phase diagram and the equation of state relevant to the early universe and compact astrophysical objects.
A new and powerful particle detector just passed a critical test in its goal to decipher the ingredients of the early universe. The sPHENIX detector is the newest experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic ...
General Physics
Sep 3, 2025
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According to theoretical predictions, within a millionth of a second after the Big Bang, nucleons had not yet formed, and matter existed as a hot, dense "soup" composed of freely moving quarks and gluons. This state of matter ...
General Physics
Aug 19, 2025
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is tough on electronics. Situated inside a 17-mile-long tunnel that runs in a circle under the border between Switzerland and France, this massive scientific instrument accelerates particles ...
General Physics
Jul 25, 2025
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The sPHENIX particle detector, the newest experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, has released its first physics results: precision ...
General Physics
Jul 18, 2025
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) gets a breath of fresh air as it collides beams of protons and oxygen ions for the very first time. Oxygen–oxygen and neon–neon collisions are also on the menu of the next few days.
General Physics
Jul 1, 2025
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New data from particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), an "atom smasher" at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory, reveals how the primordial soup generated in the ...
General Physics
Jun 11, 2025
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An international team of scientists has published a new report that moves toward a better understanding of the behavior of some of the heaviest particles in the universe under extreme conditions, which are similar to those ...
General Physics
Jun 10, 2025
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At CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), lead atom nuclei, accelerated in opposite directions, collide at speeds close to the speed of light. In such scattering processes, the quarks and gluons that make up these nuclei collide, ...
General Physics
May 16, 2025
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In collisions of argon and scandium atomic nuclei, scientists from the international NA61/SHINE experiment have observed a clear anomaly indicative of a violation of one of the most important symmetries of the quark world: ...
General Physics
May 8, 2025
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In a paper published in Physical Review C, the ALICE collaboration reports measurements that quantify the transmutation of lead into gold in CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
General Physics
May 8, 2025
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