Very soon after the Big Bang, the universe enjoyed a brief phase where quarks and gluons roamed freely, not yet joined up into hadrons such as protons, neutrons and mesons. This state, called a ...

A new analysis of data from the PHENIX experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) reveals fresh evidence that collisions of even very small nuclei with large ones might create tiny ...

Physicists at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, have used supercomputer simulations to predict a specific ...

At the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, the electromagnetic fields of Lorentz-contracted lead nuclei in heavy-ion collisions act as intense sources of high-energy photons, or particles of light.

UPTON, NY--Nuclear physicists from around the world seeking to understand the intricate details of the building blocks of visible matter are meeting in Venice, Italy, May 13-19, to discuss the latest ...

Scientists working on CERN’s ALICE experiment have reported the first observation of a distinctive flow pattern among quarks ...

Immediately after the Big Bang boomed, the Universe was a trillion-degree 'soup' of unimaginably dense plasma. In a breakthrough experiment, researchers have found the first evidence that this exotic ...

The early Universe was a strange place. The Universe was so dense and hot that atoms and nuclei could not form—they would be ripped apart by high-energy collisions. Even protons and neutrons could not ...

All the matter we know of in the Universe is made up of Standard Model particles. Photons and neutrinos zip through the Universe all the time, far outnumbering all the other particles. Normal, ...

Stony Brook University physicists Gabor David and Axel Drees sketch out how a signal of jet energy loss in deuteron-gold collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) supports the case that ...