LHC produces hottest temperatures ever recorded on Earth
AUG 15, 2012
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.026254
New Scientist : The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN created a quark–gluon plasma whose temperature exceeded 5 gigakelvin (5 trillion °C). The LHC is primarily known for its proton collisions, which revealed the existence of a particle very like the Higgs boson. However, researchers there also use the LHC to collide lead ions. The resulting plasma, made of extremely high energy quarks and gluons, was 40% hotter than the previous record temperature, established by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. Both the LHC and RHIC are re-creating conditions that occurred just microseconds after the Big Bang. One of the goals of the research is to determine at what energy the quark–gluon plasma settles into normal matter.
© 2012 American Institute of Physics
