Researchers at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, led by MIT physicists, have observed direct evidence that quarks generate wakes while traveling through quark-gluon plasma, similar to ripples created by a duck moving across water. This finding confirms that the plasma responds to fast-moving particles as a cohesive fluid, producing waves and swirling motion. The discovery represents a significant milestone in understanding the behavior of matter that filled the universe during its earliest moments.
Quark-gluon plasma is thought to be the first liquid in the universe, existing at temperatures of several trillion degrees Celsius for only microseconds after the Big Bang before cooling and allowing quarks and gluons to combine into the particles that make up matter today. Scientists recreate this primordial material by colliding heavy ions at nearly the speed of light at particle accelerators. The hybrid model, developed by MIT physicist Krishna Rajagopal and collaborators, predicted that quark-gluon plasma should behave like a fluid when energetic particles move through it, creating detectable wakes. The current observations provide experimental confirmation of this theoretical prediction.
Previous attempts to identify quark wakes focused on quark-antiquark pairs, but this approach proved problematic because the two particles moving in opposite directions created overlapping disturbances that obscured the detection of individual wakes. The MIT-led team developed a new technique using Z bosons, neutral elementary particles that interact minimally with the surrounding plasma, as reference points. By identifying collisions that produced a Z boson and a single quark traveling in nearly opposite directions, researchers were able to isolate and measure the wake created by an individual quark. The findings, published in Physics Letters B, emerged from analysis of data gathered by the CMS Collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider.
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