Physicists just saw quarks make waves in the Big Bang’s primordial soup

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider have captured the clearest evidence yet that quark-gluon plasma, the scorching-hot matter that filled the newborn universe, behaves like a true liquid. By tracking individual quarks as they blasted through the plasma, researchers saw them leave behind ripples, splashes, and swirling wakes much like a duck moving through water. The finding suggests this primordial “soup” is so dense that it can slow speeding quarks and respond collectively as a fluid.

Physicists just saw quarks make waves in the Big Bang’s primordial soup. Physicists just saw quarks make waves in the Big Bang’s primordial soup Science News from research organizations Physicists just saw quarks make waves in the Big Bang’s primordial soup Scientists have watched speeding quarks create ripples in primordial matter, revealing just how liquid-like the early universe really was. “Studying how quark wakes bounce back and forth will give us new insights on the quark-gluon plasma’s properties,” Yen-Jie Lee says.

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.