Physicists analyzing particle collisions at CERN have found that quarks leave behind ripples as they travel through quark-gluon plasma. By isolating single high-energy quarks rather than pairs, an MIT-led team detected the splashes and swirls generated in this trillion-degree soup. The measurements confirm that the universe's earliest matter behaved as a dense, unified fluid rather than a collection of independent particles.
This gives researchers a way to map the properties of the hottest liquid known to physics, though the droplets last for less than a quadrillionth of a second and must be reconstructed from complex collision patterns. We are still a long way from turning these snapshots into a complete picture of the first microseconds of the universe. It is a neat technical advance, but interpreting the wakes will require plenty of refinement before we understand how that primordial fluid truly flowed.
more: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/10/261004002556.htm
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