What filled the universe in its first microseconds wasn’t gas, dust or atoms — it was a trillion-degree soup of quarks and gluons, and the LHC has now seen a single quark leave the wake through it that physicists had predicted for years

What filled the universe in its first microseconds wasn’t gas, dust or atoms — it was a trillion-degree soup of quarks and gluons, and the LHC has now seen a single quark leave the wake through it that physicists had predicted for years

The CMS experiment at CERN has reported the first direct observation of a diffusion wake in quark-gluon plasma using dijet events, the short-lived fluid created when lead nuclei collide inside the Large Hadron Collider. The signal appeared as a deficit of low-momentum charged particles and exceeded five standard deviations in the most central collisions. This was not a camera-like sighting of one identifiable quark cutting a visible channel. CMS…