The most important mystery of the universe, which intrigues the minds of the entire scientific world, is the quark-gluon plasma. It is assumed that all matter in the Universe before the Big Bang, which took place about 15 billion years ago, was precisely a quark-gluon plasma. Now this type of matter can be formed as a result of the collision of particles with high energies. In 2005, quark-gluon plasma was obtained experimentally using the RHIC accelerator installed at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Five years later, in the same laboratory, scientists obtained plasma with a temperature of 4 trillion degrees Celsius. Last year, it was possible to reach a record temperature of 10 trillion degrees with the help of the most modern invention of mankind – an accelerator called the LHC, which many people today figuratively call the Large Hadron Microscope.

The LHC is a huge device made in the form of a donut with a circumference of about 27 km. The circumference of the device lies on the border of Switzerland and France at a depth of 50-175 meters underground. The essence of the experiments carried out with the help of the LHC is as follows – from different ends of the circle in a ring at great speed two beams of particles move towards each other, after which, colliding, they form something like the Big Bang. It is worth noting that the speed of the particles at the moment of collision practically reaches the speed of light.

According to Viktor Matveev, director of the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the explosion, after which the modern Universe was formed, was much more powerful than the explosions that were simulated at the LHC. However, such experiments are necessary to discover new states of matter that took place in the first seconds of the birth of the Universe. We are talking about the so-called quark-gluon plasma.

Now scientists from the Vienna Technical University managed to obtain new information about this substance. It turned out that the quark-gluon plasma may be less viscous than previously assumed in accordance with the concept of the origin of the Universe. Hence, we can conclude that the Universe was born in a fairly liquid medium. Scientists are convinced that they eventually managed to obtain a perfectly liquid plasma.

But it is not possible to calculate the degree of plasma liquid by standard methods. Therefore, various theoretical models are used for the necessary calculations. One thing is certain – the viscosity of the plasma obtained at the LHC can even have a “nonzero” value, since its viscosity indices are much lower than the viscosity of super-liquid helium. The new data will be tested in further experiments at the LHC.