Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the “Big Bang machine” that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at the LHC’s Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) collaboration, including researchers at MIT and Rice University.

The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either “color-glass condensate” — a flattened nucleus transformed into a “wall” of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be “quark-gluon plasma,” a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.

“The color-glass condensate is one of the two most prominent possible explanations for the effect we have seen, with the other being the creation of a dense ‘liquid’ system that expands and leads to the observed correlations,” wrote Gunther Roland, an MIT physicist who led the analysis of the collisions and is a co-author on a paper on the results, due to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Physical Review B, in an email to TPM.

“Formation of a quark gluon plasma in the much smaller [proton-lead collisions] system would be considered rather surprising,” Roland wrote to TPM. “It only exists at extremely high temperature (several trillion degrees Kelvin).”

Either of these strange types of matter would have been around at the start of the Universe, shortly after the Big Bang (hence the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator’s nickname). The color glass composite is also considered to be a precusor to the quark gluon plasma.