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LHC may have discovered a new type of matter


CharlieEckert

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Well I am sure that you are all familiar with the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) discovery of the Higgs boson, but it looks as if the LHC as made another discovery, this one accidental!!!

After 2 million lead-proton collisions, the CMS team at the LHC discovered that several pairs of particles - that were created from the collision- flew away from each other with their respective directions being correlated. I am not a particles physicist so I have really no idea what this means or the significant of this, but physicists certainly found this surprising. “Somehow they fly at the same direction even though it's not clear how they can communicate their direction with one another. That has surprised many people, including us,” says MIT physics professor Gunther Roland

Physicists have two theories on what this matter is, “The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either “color-glass condensate” — a flattened nucleus transformed into a “wall” of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be “quark-gluon plasma,” a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles.”

Both of these theories believe that this matter would be present at the inception of universe, moments after the big bang. I imagine scientists will attempt to replicate this finding to better their understanding of the beginning of our universe.

Perhaps the most interesting thing is that fact that the team at the LHC were not searching or expecting for this discovery of new matter. They were caught with complete surprise from their findings.

“It was supposed to be sort of a reference run — a run in which you can study background effects and then subtract them from the effects that you see in lead-lead collisions,” Gunther Roland

http://www.rdmag.com/news/2012/11/cern-collider-may-have-produced-new-type-matter

http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/11/large-hadron-collider-may-have-produced-new-matter.php

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