Heavy Ion Physics

The study of relativistic heavy-ion collisions is very important and necessary part of the LHC research program which is at CERN. This type of emerging field of research focuses on the study of matter under extreme conditions of temperature, pressure and density.To recreate conditions which are similar to those of the very early universe, powerful accelerators make the head-on collisions between massive ions  such as lead or gold nuclei. In these heavy-ion collisions there are many hundreds of protons and also  the hundreds of  neutrons and they smash almost into one another at the energies of upwards of a few trillion electron volts. This forms a miniscule fireball so that everything melts into a quark-gluon plasma.