Narrator: Thomas Cormier and his team recreated
the conditions of the universe right after
the Big Bang, approximately 13.8 billion years
ago.
Thomas Cormier: Now, at this facility, what
we do is we collide elementary particles.
My specialty is colliding whole nuclei.
Whole lead nuclei, circulating around this
accelerator in opposite directions at really
unprecedented energies, are brought into collisions
as a means to produce tiny samples of ordinary
matter, heated to trillions of degrees Centigrade
and compressed to hundreds of times the density
of normal nuclei, to essentially turn back
the clock.
This tiny sample of matter is similar to,
it turns out, what the matter that made up
the universe was like when the universe was
only a few microseconds old.
Basically, so it’s basically using that
facility, and those special ions, gives us
a window into the nature of the matter that
filled the universe when it was only a few
microseconds old.
What we do is we take a sample of matter the
size of a lead nucleus and heat it, as I said,
to trillions and trillions of degrees, until
the matter melts into a soup, which is very
much like the early universe in the first
few microseconds of its existence.
And then, our detectors help us study the
properties of that matter and observe it as
it expands and cools and turns back into ordinary
matter.
So, we can trace it from the instant of the
collision, where the temperature goes from
essentially zero all the way up to trillions
and trillions of degrees in the collision,
and then watch the collision come apart in
our detectors as the matter cools back down.
And can watch the transitions that it goes
through, the same transitions that the early
universe went through, where the early constituents
of the universe was this soup of quarks and
gluons at very, very high temperature, which
expanded.
The universe expanded through its first moments
of existence, and as it expanded it cooled
in the same way that our little mini-bangs
expand and cool when we perform the collisions
at the Large Hadron Collider.
So, we can study how ordinary matter reappears.
You start with these collisions, they create
the matter of the early universe, and then
study it as it reemerges as ordinary matter
and what kind of matter is made.
Do we make the protons and neutrons, for instance,
that make up everything around us today appear
in our collision?
So, we start with matter, heat it to trillions
of degrees where there are no protons and
neutrons –– there are only quarks and
gluons –– and then we watch it cool and
expand.
And we watch the protons and neutrons emerge,
again, from this hot soup, just the way they
did from the early universe.
So, it is really sort of an experimental probing
of how the universe behaved in that first
few microseconds, which we can then compare
with the theories of the early universe.
