Possible early universe signals in proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

Our universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot and dense singular point, in a process known as the Big Bang. The hot and dense matter which dominated the system within a few microseconds of its birth was in the form of a soup of elementary quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma (QGP). Signatures compatible with the formation of the QGP matter have experimentally been observed in heavy-ion (such as Au or Pb) collisions at ultra-relativistic energies. Recently, experimental data of proton-proton (pp) collisions at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have also shown signals resembling those of the QGP formation, which made these studies quite stimulating as to how the collision of small systems features in producing the early universe signals. In this article, we report on some of the compelling experimental results and give an account of the present understanding. We review the pp physics program at the LHC and discuss future prospects in the context of exploring the nature of the primordial matter in the early universe.

7 pages and 7 figures, written for general multi-disciplinary readers, Published version in Current Science

References in corpus (4)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• Centrality, transverse momentum and collision energy dependence of the Tsallis parameters in relativistic heavy-ion collisions
• Possible early universe signals in proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
• Measurement of two-particle correlations in hadronic $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ collisions at Belle

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Possible early universe signals in proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
• Evolution of Effective Temperature, Kinetic Freeze-out Temperature and transverse flow velocity in pp Collision
• Design and development of advanced Al-Ti-V alloys for beampipe applications in particle accelerators
• Soret and Dufour effects in hot and dense QCD matter