Read article 'FAIR forges its future'
Supernova explosions, neutron-star mergers and rare radioactive ions might not seem to have much connection to terrestrial matters. Yet, while the lightest elements were synthesised immediately after ...
Read article '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 ...
Read article 'LHCb brings cosmic collisions down to Earth'
The LHCb collaboration has generated high-energy collisions between protons and helium nuclei similar to those that take place when cosmic rays strike the interstellar medium.
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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 ...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
Read article '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...
