Particle collisions cast light on how matter forms from seemingly empty space

In the moments after the Big Bang, most of the visible matter in the present-day Universe existed as a hot ‘soup’ that included fundamental particles called quarks. As the Universe cooled, the quarks bound together to form composite particles known as hadrons, which include protons and neutrons. The mechanism of hadron formation is not fully understood, but, writing in Nature, the STAR Collaboration¹ reports observations of hadrons forming after high-energy particle collisions, from pairs of quarks with properties that are correlated through quantum physics, and which are created from the vacuum of seemingly empty space.

Source link