CERN physicists generate miniature quark-gluon plasma using tiny oxygen and neon nuclei

Physicists from the Niels Bohr Institute, working within the international ALICE collaboration at CERN, have shown that collisions of very light atomic nuclei can still generate quark-gluon plasma, the extreme matter that existed in the Universe’s first millionth of a second. By accelerating oxygen-16 and neon-20 ions to almost the speed of light and colliding them, the team created microscopic “Little Big Bangs” that lasted only a fraction of a second.

The plasma’s brief existence was inferred from the spray of particles that emerged, whose directional patterns encoded the geometric shape of the original nuclei—rounded for oxygen and bowling-pin-like for neon. Associate Professor You Zhou highlighted that this breakthrough expands the range of nuclear sizes usable for studying the strong force and the Universe’s birth. Postdoctoral researcher Emil Gorm Dahlbæk Nielsen likened the method to reading a shadow to discern an object’s outline. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.