Topic
A hot, deconfined phase of quarks and gluons thought to have filled the early universe, recreated via heavy-ion collisions at RHIC and the LHC.
Brookhaven's STAR experiment found a dip in collision-to-collision particle-flow fluctuations across about 1 billion gold collisions at 3 to 7.7 GeV. The researchers call it a hint of nuclear matter's long-sought critical point, short of proof.
Reality
CMS physicists have measured, for the first time, the diffusion wakes jets leave behind in quark-gluon plasma, 20 years after they were first predicted. The result adds a second test of the fluid picture of the matter that filled the universe for its first microseconds.
Reality
Colliding oxygen-16 and neon-20 produced quark-gluon plasma, and the outgoing particles carried the shape of the incoming nuclei. Light-ion runs now buy two results at once.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
STAR's proxy for temperature swings between gold-gold collisions stops falling and turns back up at the bottom of RHIC's energy range, a result now fixed in a dataset the collider finished taking in 2026.
Reality
A Sophia University calculation of 5.36 TeV oxygen-oxygen collisions at the LHC counts how much of the matter actually equilibrates, and finds a nonequilibrated remainder near 30% that survives even the most central events.
Reality
The elliptic signal says neon-20 is not spherical. The triangular signal runs the wrong way, and no number for the deformation survives that disagreement.
Reality