Party at CERN the journey in search of the first moments of the Big Bang – The Messenger

Party at CERN in Geneva the journey that will lead scientists to the first moments of the Big Bang. A journey that, through new ion collisions at an energy record, will study a “soup of particles” existed only a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, reproducing conditions similar to those present in the first millionths of a second life of ‘ universe.

The new experimental phase of CERN comes after the restart, in June 2015, a super-energy of 13 trillion electron volts (TeV ), superacceleratore the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), and after the first few months of data collection generated by the collisions of protons.

‘ tradition collide ions for about a month every year as part of the research program of the LHC. But this year is special – said Rolf Heuer, director general of Cern- because we reach a new energy and explore the matter in the very early stages of our universe. ” Ion collisions will, in fact, physicists at CERN – which includes about 1,500 Italians, half of which are coordinated by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN) – to study a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma . It is a soup of particles existed briefly a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang.