Early Universe Plasma created by Physicists

A team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider working with researchers from the University of Kansas has created a small amount of plasma similar to the plasma thought to have been at the beginning of the universe.

This plasma was created by colliding a lead nucleus and a proton particle inside the Compact Muon Solenoid detector at CERN. The quark-gluon based particle is the absolute highest temperature particle that has ever been formed in a lab and scientists are still trying to understand how physics work at these extreme temperatures. Lead scientists for the CMS detector expect the discovery to aid their knowledge in the area of high energy physics.

Within the study of Big Bang Cosmology, the plank epoch period (0 to 10−43 second after the Big Bang) is thought to have been the very slight period of time which the temperate of the universe became so hot that the four fundamental forces were singular. In the beginning, our universe was in a dense state of energy extreme heat. The lab created the quark-gluon plasma particle with a temperature of 7 Million Degrees Fahrenheit .

Quan Wang, a KU postdoctoral researcher working with CERN said;

"It’s believed to correspond to the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. While we believe the state of the universe about a microsecond after the Big Bang consisted of a quark-gluon plasma, there is still much that we don’t fully understand about the properties of quark-gluon plasma. One of the biggest surprises of the earlier measurements at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory was the fluid-like behavior of the quark-gluon plasma. Being able to form quark-gluon plasma in proton-lead collisions helps us to better define the conditions needed for its existence.”