I've been watching experiments running all month on the LHC web site, including those from ATLAS. You too can do so here. You can select what you want to see via the dropdown menu in the top left.
A paper showing the creation of a quark-gluon plasma at the LHC by the ATLAS experiment was accepted for publication today. A related experiment, CMS, is going to try to confirm this soon.
Quarks are the particles that make up protons, neutrons, and so forth. Gluons are the force particles that keep quarks stuck together. If you move two quarks apart, they create more gluons; unlike gravity and electromagnetism, which get weaker over long distances, the strong force (which is what we call the force that gluons carry) is stronger at longer distances. So you have to heat your quarks up a lot to get them to move apart significantly, and when you do, you get a lot of gluons being created. If you heat things up enough, the quarks from different nuclei will all mingle together in a sea of gluons, sort of like when you dissolve salt in water. This is called a plasma.
This event is important because it gives us details about the first few seconds of the Universe. These measurements might help explain why we have a lot of matter, but not much antimatter. New particles might be formed in the aftermath of such a plasma... perhaps dark matter particles, or the Higgs boson. We might even be able to discover new fundamental forces in such plasmas!
In related news, there is was a suggestion recently published that it might be possible to prove or disprove the hypothesis of supersymmetry very soon. Several groups of researchers have figured out what to look for, and it's within the capacity of the LHC to do it.
Exciting days ahead in the world of physics. You can get a schedule of the LHC's planned events online, if you're interested in the current state of affairs.
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