A xenon–xenon collision recorded by the CMS detector. (Image: CMS/CERN)
Some 900 nuclear physicists from all over the world are meeting this week in Venice, Italy, for Quark Matter 2018, the 27th International Conference on Ultrarelativistic Nucleus–Nucleus Collisions. The focus of the conference is the hot quark–gluon plasma (QGP) that is thought to have prevailed in the first millionths of a second after the Big Bang, and which can be created for a fleeting moment in collisions of atomic nuclei accelerated in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). At the conference, the main LHC experiments (ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb) are presenting a wealth of new results from such collisions that provide insight into this extreme state of matter.
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