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| LHC: Phys.org |
Apparently discovering a Higgs-like particle isn’t enough for the physicists working at the CERN facility, now another team working with the LHC has broken the record for the hottest manmade material ever.
Old record: four trillion degrees Celsius: 4,000,000,000,000 = 4 x 1012 oC
New record: ~ in the range of five and a half trillion degrees Celsius, a bump up of some thirty eight percent.
The three teams working at CERN, ATLAS, CMS and ALICE are all working on the same basic problem, figuring out what existed just after the Big Bang so as to better understand how matter works at the subatomic level. ATLAS and CMS were recently in the news of course for finding evidence of particles that strongly resemble the notorious Higgs boson. Meanwhile the ALICE team has been hard at work smashing lead ions into one another creating quark-gluon plasma, material that is being described as a primordial soup, because it is believed to be similar to the stuff that came about right after the Big Bang, and because unlike protons and neutrons, they are believed to move around freely, rather than existing as a bound material.
Phys.org: CERN physicists break record for hottest manmade material
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