Particle Physics


Melting Subatomic Ice Cubes

Look out solid, liquid and gas: There’s a new form of matter in town. Actually, this “new” matter isn’t new at all—it is one of the most ancient forms of matter in the universe. Last seen more than 13 billion years ago, just millionths of a second after the Big Bang, this exotic stuff is making a comeback thanks to particle accelerators like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) on Long Island and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe, where physicists can generate temperatures of more than a trillion degrees centigrade. These enormous temperatures allow scientists to push back the clock of the cosmos and witness matter in the extreme energy environment that existed within microseconds of the Big Bang.

At such high temperatures, the protons and neutrons inside atomic nuclei literally melt, releasing the quarks and gluons inside them and creating a form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma. You can think of the quarks as the “matter” particles and gluons as the particles of force that hold the protons and neutrons together. A reasonable mental image of a proton or neutron would be like a few flecks of Styrofoam (quarks) inside a lottery ball machine. The wind in the lottery machine is analogous to the force field, while the air molecules represent the gluons.

Under ordinary conditions, quarks and gluons are forever locked inside protons and neutrons. They’re like the water held frozen into ice cubes in a glass. But just as ice can be melted into water when energy is added to the system (by pouring hot tea over them, for instance) allowing the molecules from one ice cube to mix with molecules from other cubes, so too it is possible to melt protons and neutrons and have the quarks and gluons scamper around willy-nilly.

To melt protons and neutrons, you need to heat them up to about a trillion degrees. The only way to generate this kind of temperature is to smash together atomic nuclei at high velocities in huge particle accelerators. That’s what physicists are now doing at the LHC and the RHIC, accelerators that take atoms (lead and gold, as well as some others), strip off all of the electrons, and then slam the bare atomic nuclei together. The most violent of these collisions can heat up the nuclear matter enough to free the quarks and gluons to wander as they will. Though experimental calibration issues add some uncertainty to the mix, the current temperature record seems to belong to the ALICE experiment at the LHC, which measured an astounding 5.5 trillion degrees centigrade.


Studying the phase transitions of quark-gluon plasma allows us to understand the behavior of matter in the early universe, just fractions of a second after the Big Bang, as well as conditions that might exist inside neutron stars. The fact that these two disparate phenomena are related demonstrates just how deeply the cosmic and quantum worlds are intertwined. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

While the first lab-made quark-gluon plasma was created in 2000, physicists are only now beginning to understand how this form of matter behaves. At the LHC and RHIC, they are mapping out in more detail the temperatures and pressures at which ordinary matter transforms into quark-gluon plasma. They are also tracing the boundaries between quark-gluon plasmas and even more exotic forms of matter like the stuff of neutrons stars, which is thought to be so dense that, at the center of the stars, quarks get “smooshed” together into an exotic kind of solid.

In fact, physicists believe that there are many different phases of matter involving quarks. While I’ve focused on two states of matter, atomic nuclei and quark-gluon plasma, this just scratches the surface of the possible.

By studying quark-gluon plasma, physicists are able to explore a period in the history of the universe that has thus far eluded us—a period in which protons and neutrons, the basic ingredients of ordinary matter, were coalescing for the first time. Thanks to accelerators like the LHC and the RHIC, we are finally beginning to probe this pivotal chapter in the story of cosmos.

Go Deeper
Editor’s picks for further reading

Brookhaven Lab: Quark-Gluon Plasma: a New State of Matter
In this video, physicist Peter Steinberg explains the nature of a quark-gluon plasma.

Physics Central: Quark-Gluon Plasma
Learn the basics of quark-gluon plasmas in this explainer from the American Physical Society.

Quark Matter 2012
Explore highlights from the August 2012 Quark Matter conference, held in Washington, DC.



Don Lincoln


    • Darknessoverload696969

      My question is can there be more then just this maybe particles that are smaller then this. Also will it ever be possible to see or get an idea of how things were before the big bang.

      •!/pages/Don-Lincoln/100958137881 Don Lincoln

        If you mean by particles smaller than quarks, yes…physicists are always looking for them. Thus far, there has been no success.

        The conditions observed in the quark/gluon plasma was prevalent in the universe about a millionth of a second after the big bang. If you look at the temperatures in other collisions at the LHC, they go as far back as a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

        Astronomers and theoretical physicists are thinking about ways to understand the universe before the Big Bang. It’s a credible question, but difficult. I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, but the next couple of decades could bring some insights on this.

    • Jerry Johnson

      My question is, why are we looking at this with such importance? Sure it is the next step in understanding, but. The public investment is huge and granted it should be but are we looking for something that will benifit us in the form of a usabal energy or is this more to satisfy our cureoscity.

      •!/pages/Don-Lincoln/100958137881 Don Lincoln

        For every dollar spent in research, the return is about three dollars, which is an excellent investment. Not all research gives a return. Some returns zero, while others return enormously. It is only on average that the return is three times the investment.

        Further, the return is sometimes indirect. Research similar to this resulted in technical advances like medical imaging, cancer treatment, the touch screens you see on iPads and something as culture-changing as the World Wide Web.

        This research is unlikely to lead directly to a new consumer gizmo. There will be no hoverboards, no flying cars, no delicious and yet calorie-free ice cream. It will push back the frontiers of knowledge and enoble the human race, as the one creature in all of creation who is capable of understanding the rules that govern the universe, of how we got here and why we exist.

        Technical spinoffs are common and we have pushed back the dark shadows of ignorance. This sounds like an worthwhile win for all of us.

    • Alishathri

      keep on physicists.