LHC experiments bring new insight into matter of the primordial universe

Geneva, 13 August 2012. Experiments using heavy ions at CERN 's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are advancing understanding of the primordial universe. The ALICE, ATLAS and CMS collaborations have made new measurements of the kind of matter that probably existed in the first instants of the universe. They will present their latest results at the Quark Matter 2012 conference, which starts today in Washington DC. The new findings are based mainly on the four-week LHC run with lead ions in 2011, during which the experiments collected 20 times more data than in 2010. Just after the big bang, quarks and gluons - basic building blocks of matter - were not confined inside composite particles such as protons and neutrons, as they are today. Instead, they moved freely in a state of matter known as "quark-gluon plasma".