A step closer to Big Bang conditions?
Since December, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been smashing particles together at record-setting energy levels. Physicists hope that those high-energy collisions could replicate the conditions seen immediately after the Big Bang, shedding light on how our universe came to be. Now, data from collisions that took place in July suggests that the LHC may have have taken a step toward that goal.The finding, which has been submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, comes from proton-proton collisions that occurred in the LHC in July, each of which produced 100 or more charged particles. One of the two large, general-purpose detectors at LHC, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, measured the path that each of these particles took after the collision.The CMS physicists observed a surprising new phenomenon in some pairs of those particles: They appeared to be associated together at the point of collision. That is, when some...