Proton–proton collisions become stranger
Recreating the intense fireball of quarks and gluons that existed immediately after the Big Bang, the quark–gluon plasma (QGP), traditionally requires high-energy collisions between heavy ions such ...
LHCb brings cosmic collisions down to Earth
In an effort to improve our understanding of cosmic rays, the LHCb collaboration has generated high-energy collisions between protons and helium nuclei similar to those that take place when cosmic ray...
ALICE reveals dominance of collective flow
The study of the anisotropic flow in heavy-ion collisions at the LHC, which measures the momentum anisotropy of the final-state particles, has been effective in characterising the extreme states of ma...
ATLAS reveals more strangeness in the proton
The excellent theoretical understanding of the production of electroweak W and Z gauge bosons in proton–proton collisions at the LHC makes these “standard-candle” processes ideal for studying th...
ALICE measures shape of the QGP fireball at freeze-out
Heavy-ion collisions at LHC energies create a hot and dense medium of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). The QGP fireball first expands, cools and then freezes out ...
The two-loop explosion
Studying matter at the highest energies possible has transformed our understanding of the microscopic world. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which generates proton collisions at the highest ener...
A 30-year adventure with heavy ions
Heavy-ion and proton–proton collisions at ultrarelativistic energies provide a unique system with which to investigate the dynamics of matter in the early universe. By generating an incredibly hot a...
ALICE studies beauty in the quark–gluon plasma
In high-energy nucleus–nucleus collisions, heavy-flavour quarks (charm and beauty) are produced on a very short time scale in initial hard-scattering processes and thus they experience the entire ev...
Quark–gluon plasma insights
Powerful supercomputer simulations of colliding atomic nuclei have provided new insights about quark–gluon plasma (QGP), a superhot fluid of de-confined partons produced in heavy-ion collisions at t...
ALICE zeroes in on cold-matter effects
Measuring the production cross-section of charm hadrons in proton–proton collisions provides an important test of perturbative quantum chromodynamics (QCD). In proton–nucleus collisions, “cold-m...
