ATLAS heavy collision experiment between lead ions produce top quarks
Scientists at CERN ran the large hadron collider to detect top quarks, the heaviest known fundamental particles in the universe, and it worked.
In 1995, a team of scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) discovered the heaviest fundamental particle known to mankind called the top quark. What was intriguing about these top quarks was that despite their large mass, they decay almost instantly, making it hard to study directly.
The ATLAS collaboration, a group of researchers working with the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), has detected top quarks in a collision between lead ions. Generally, top quarks are studied in proton-proton collisions, but this is the first time they have been observed in a heavy-ion collision.
“This observation represents a significant step forward in heavy-ion collision physics, paving the way for new measurements of the quark-gluon plasma (QGP) that is created in these collisions and delivering fresh insights into the nature of the strong force that binds protons, neutrons, and other composite particles together,” the ATLAS collaboration noted.
Probing QGP and top quark detection
It is believed that large amounts of quark-gluon plasma (QGP) were formed soon after the Big Bang, and this plasma provided the conditions necessary for the formation of protons, neutrons, and various other fundamental particles.
Understanding QGP at length can help scientists understand the factors that contributed to the origin of all matter as we know it. However, when QGP is observed using heavy-ion collisions, it appears with a lifetime of 10-23 seconds — making it impossible to study.
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