The universe we live in and everything in it burst into existence roughly 13.8 billion years ago. In its infancy, the cosmos was filled with a dense primordial “soup” of quark-gluon plasma, which, as ...

The U.S. nuclear physics community is preparing to build the electron–ion collider (EIC), a flagship facility for probing the properties of matter and the strong nuclear force that holds matter ...

What does quark-gluon plasma -- the hot soup of elementary particles formed a few microseconds after the Big Bang -- have in common with tap water? Scientists say it's the way it flows. What does ...

Solid as a rock, liquid like the seas, or gas like the air we breathe: everything on earth exists in these three states. But most of the universe is not like this. The stars are so hot that the atoms ...

Comparing the number of direct photons emitted when proton spins point in opposite directions (top) with the number emitted when protons collide head-to-tail (bottom) revealed that gluon spins align ...

This hydrodynamic simulation shows the flow patterns, or “vorticity distribution,” from a smoke ring-like swirling fluid around the beam direction of two colliding heavy ions. The simulation provides ...

Suppression of a telltale sign of quark-gluon interactions indicates gluon recombination in dense walls of gluons. Previous experiments have shown that when ions are accelerated to high energies, ...

Very soon after the Big Bang, the universe enjoyed a brief phase where quarks and gluons roamed freely, not yet joined up into hadrons such as protons, neutrons and mesons. This state, called a ...

Researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s RHIC particle accelerator have determined that an exotic form of matter produced in their collisions is the most rapidly spinning material ever detected ...