New findings from the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) suggest that scientists can recreate an extraordinary form of matter from the earliest moments of the universe using surprisingly small atomic collisions. By smashing oxygen nuclei together at nearly the speed of light, researchers have uncovered strong evidence of quark-gluon plasma (QGP), an extremely hot and dense state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang.
The findings, published in Physical Review Letters, reveal that high-energy streams of particles lose energy as they travel through the material created by these collisions. This effect, called jet quenching, provides an important clue that quark-gluon plasma has formed.
Scientists have previously observed jet quenching in collisions involving much larger atomic nuclei at RHIC, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility that operated at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 2000 until 2026. The same effect has also been detected in oxygen collisions at CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the European Particle Physics Laboratory.
What makes the new RHIC findings especially significant is that the oxygen collisions occurred at substantially lower energies. The results establish a new lower boundary for the conditions known to produce quark-gluon plasma in this small collision system, helping scientists narrow down what it takes to create matter resembling that of the infant universe.
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