Lead ion collisions at the Large Hadron Collider
The coming month, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will collide lead beams to create the hottest and densest matter available in the laboratory.
The four LHC experiments will be recording these collisions and use them to investigate the properties of the Quark Gluon Plasma. The image below shows an event display of one collision recorded by the ALICE experiment. The lines emerging from the center are trajectories of charged particles that are produced in the collision and detected by the ALICE detector systems. In central collisions, several thousand particles are produced.