LHC Collisions Reveal Oxygen and Neon's Shifting Nuclear Geometry
An Anonymous Coward writes:
In 2026, scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider ran experiments colliding lighter atomic nuclei-oxygen-16 with oxygen-16, and neon-20 with neon-20-at energies of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair. The four main LHC experiments confirmed these lighter ions can produce quark-gluon plasma, the super-dense, ultra-hot state of matter that existed microseconds after the Big Bang.
What made this notable was what the collision debris revealed about nuclear structure. By analyzing how particles flowed outward after impact, physicists mapped patterns tied directly to the shapes of the incoming nuclei:
Oxygen-oxygen collisions produced radially symmetric particle flow, suggesting a more spherical, tetrahedral-like nucleus structure
Neon-neon collisions generated asymmetric, elongated flow patterns-indicating a bowling pin-shaped nucleus
"It is a bit like shining light on an object and seeing its shadow," explains researcher Emil Gorm Dahlbaek Nielsen from the Niels Bohr Institute. "You cannot see the object directly, but its shadow reveals its shape."
This work, published in Physical Review Letters, represents the first clear evidence that nuclear geometry drives anisotropic flow in light-ion collisions. Storage costs for this kind of data are massive-a single year of LHC collision data generates petabytes, which would run into millions of dollars in enterprise cloud storage alone. Every terabyte matters when you're paying for retention and redundancy across multiple backup systems.
"We have pushed the boundary for how small the atomic nuclei can be while still recreating this primordial matter," says You Zhou, who led the experiment at the Niels Bohr Institute. The team plans to test even lighter nuclei like helium-4 next, trying to pinpoint where the threshold drops too low to form quark-gluon plasma.
Sources:
https://phys.org/news/2026-08-big-bowling-pin-nuclei-universe.html
https://home.cern (CERN official coverage)
I.J. Abualrob et al, Physical Review Letters (2026)
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