{"id":221829,"date":"2025-09-13T11:09:33","date_gmt":"2025-09-13T16:09:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/lhcs-first-oxygen-collisions-signs-of-small-scale-quark-gluon-plasma"},"modified":"2025-09-13T11:09:33","modified_gmt":"2025-09-13T16:09:33","slug":"lhcs-first-oxygen-collisions-signs-of-small-scale-quark-gluon-plasma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/09\/lhcs-first-oxygen-collisions-signs-of-small-scale-quark-gluon-plasma","title":{"rendered":"LHC\u2019s first oxygen collisions signs of small-scale quark-gluon plasma"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/lhcs-first-oxygen-collisions-signs-of-small-scale-quark-gluon-plasma.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><em><strong>CMS scientists study the first-ever oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC, and observe signs of quarks and gluons losing energy when they travel through quark-gluon plasma \u2013 a state that existed just after the Big Bang.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p>When heavy ions such as lead (Pb) collide at nearly the speed of light inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), extreme conditions are created that can \u201cmelt\u201d ordinary nuclear matter into a new state called the <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/science\/physics\/heavy-ions-and-quark-gluon-plasma\">quark-gluon plasma (QGP)<\/a>. This hot and dense medium is believed to resemble the universe just microseconds after the Big Bang, when quarks and gluons \u2013 the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons \u2013 moved freely.<\/p>\n<p>Physicists study the QGP medium by looking at how fast-moving quarks and gluons \u2013 collectively called partons \u2013 behave as they pass through it. Fast moving partons form sprays of particles, which can be seen as \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.symmetrymagazine.org\/article\/octobernovember-2007\/jets?language_content_entity=und\">jets<\/a>\u201d in particle detectors. In collisions of very small systems, such as proton-proton collisions, the observed jets are seen to retain the full energy or the original partons. In contrast, in heavy-ion collisions, the presence of the QGP medium leads to a significant loss of energy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>CMS scientists study the first-ever oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC, and observe signs of quarks and gluons losing energy when they travel through quark-gluon plasma \u2013 a state that existed just after the Big Bang. When heavy ions such as lead (Pb) collide at nearly the speed of light inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,873,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-221829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-nuclear-energy","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=221829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/221829\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=221829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=221829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=221829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}