RECREATING THE BIG BANG

At the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the particle-smashing Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been hard at work accelerating particles to breakneck speeds close to the speed of light. The aim? To attempt to recreate what the early universe might have been like just a few minutes after it was born. The accelerator, which houses two detectors dedicated to pinpointing moments during our universe’s growth, works as a Big Bang-making machine. But this ‘explosion’ is on a much smaller scale and scientists have a bit more control over it.

For A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE), the aim is to smash particles of lead into each other to create a plasma that existed some tenmillionths of a second after the Big Bang. The plasma produced in ALICE is fairly representative of the gloop of the early universe. But the fireball created is much smaller and hence will cool much quicker. The results brought about by the detector are indicative of breakthroughs in our understanding of the early cosmos.

Meanwhile, LHC beauty is trying to solve the reason behind why there were unequal amounts of antimatter and matter after the Big Bang.