A soup of ultra-hot elementary particles could be the key to understanding what the universe was like just after its formation, scientists say.
Over the past few years, physicists have created this soup inside two of the world's most powerful particle accelerators — the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in New York — by smashing particles together at superfast speeds.
When two particles collide, they explode into pure energy powerful enough to melt down atoms and break apart protons and neutrons (the building blocks of atomic nuclei) into their constituent quarks and gluons. Protons and neutrons contain three quarks each, and gluons are the mass-less glue that holds the quarks together.
The result is a plasma scientists call an " almost-perfect liquid," with almost zero friction.
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