The world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), nicknamed the “Big Bang Machine,” has chalked-up another superlative: The hottest and densest matter ever created.
As the organization in charge of the accelerator, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), announced on Monday, three experiments on the machine “have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe.”
Furthermore, at a particle physics conference this week in Washington, D.C., CERN scientists:
“will present more refined characterizations of the densest and hottest matter ever studied in the laboratory – 100,000 times hotter than the interior of the Sun and denser than a neutron star.”
The extreme temperature, which eclipses a record held by U.S.-based Brookhaven National Laboratory, was expected, given the immense energy at which beams of lead ions were smashed together in the LHC. The announcement comes fresh off the LHC’s success of finding what appears to be the Higgs boson, a long-sought particle that could help explain the Universe.
