{"id":233958,"date":"2026-03-24T03:29:28","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T08:29:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/alice-sees-new-sign-of-primordial-plasma-in-proton-collisions"},"modified":"2026-03-24T03:29:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T08:29:28","slug":"alice-sees-new-sign-of-primordial-plasma-in-proton-collisions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/alice-sees-new-sign-of-primordial-plasma-in-proton-collisions","title":{"rendered":"ALICE sees new sign of primordial plasma in proton collisions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/alice-sees-new-sign-of-primordial-plasma-in-proton-collisions.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The ALICE Collaboration takes a step further in addressing the question of whether a quark\u2013gluon plasma can be formed in proton\u2013proton and proton\u2013nucleus collisions. In the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state of matter known as quark\u2013gluon plasma (QGP), which can be reproduced with high-energy collisions between heavy ions such as lead nuclei.<\/p>\n<p>In a paper <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-67795-1\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in <i>Nature Communications<\/i>, the ALICE Collaboration reports observing a remarkable common pattern in proton\u2013proton, proton\u2013lead and lead\u2013lead collisions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), shedding new light on possible QGP formation and evolution in small collision systems.<\/p>\n<p>Physicists initially believed that colliding small systems, such as protons, could not generate the extreme temperatures and pressures needed to form QGP. But in recent years, <a href=\"https:\/\/home.cern\/news\/series\/lhc-physics-ten\/recreating-big-bang-matter-earth\" target=\"_blank\">signatures<\/a> of QGP have been observed in proton\u2013proton and proton\u2013lead collisions at the LHC, indicating that the size of the collision system may not be a limiting factor in QGP creation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The ALICE Collaboration takes a step further in addressing the question of whether a quark\u2013gluon plasma can be formed in proton\u2013proton and proton\u2013nucleus collisions. In the first few microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state of matter known as quark\u2013gluon plasma (QGP), which can be reproduced with [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,385,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-evolution","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233958","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\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233958"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233958\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233958"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233958"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233958"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}