Here at CERN, we smash lead atoms!💥 I tell you why we want "Heavy-Ion Collisions"

Once a year, the Large Hadron Collider, here at CERN, smashes lead atoms instead of protons; and we call them "Heavy-Ion collisions"

But why? Why do we want to smash lead atoms?!

One of the things we want to explore here at CERN is how our own Universe started and evolved. For that, we need to go back in time...

No, we didn't invent a time machine (yet!😉).

Going back in time, in this context, means that we can recreate the conditions the Universe had when it was a "baby universe", and study how it behaves. Or, better, study its early components and how they interact with each other.

Because of that, once a year, we collide lead atoms.

Not really "atoms", actually. In reality, we strip off electrons from lead atoms to only keep the heavy nucleus, which technically is a lead "ion". And that's why we call these collisions "heavy-ion collisions".

Those lead "ions" are heavy enough to produce enormous energy in a small, confined space (this is what we usually call "energy density")

And that creates what we call a "quark-gluon plasma": the primordial, hot soup that filled our own Universe a few instants after the Big Bang! 💥

So, by colliding lead atoms, we can study that peculiar state of matter that originated everything we can see and touch around us every day.

That's why it's so interesting!! 🙌

Did you know about this? I love all that! 🤩 Is it interesting, isn't it?!

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🎶 Thanks to Moins Le Quartet for their beautiful "A Little Wiggle" track, which I used in my video! 👏
Do you like the music as well and do you want to use it in your creative projects? Find my playlist with all the tracks music I used in my own videos, here:

https://share.epidemicsound.com/45egd...

And, if you sign up for Epidemic Sound through the playlist link, you'll get 1 month for free! 🙌

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🙋‍♂️Hi! Nice to meet you!

I'm Riccardo Maria BIANCHI, PhD, also known as "Dr. Ric", and I'm a scientist working at CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland.

In particular, I'm a particle physicist and one of the scientists working on the enormous ATLAS experiment, the largest of the four main experiments on the “Large Hadron Collider”, which is the biggest "particle smasher" ever built by humans! 💥

If you love physics and science, but you always felt you didn’t understand it, then follow me for amazing stuff on tiny particles & the giant Universe, CERN discoveries & basic physics — Everything told in simple words! Always. Promised👌

Particle Soup: Physics, well told by a physicist! 😉

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#cern #physics