A team of researchers working with an international team at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) said they have discovered quark-gluon plasma, with fewer particles than previously thought was possible.

According to the researchers associated with the finding, the discovery was made by colliding protons with lead nuclei at high energy inside the supercollider's Compact Muon Solenoid detector. The physicists have named the resulting plasma as the 'littlest liquid'.

Quan Wang, a KU postdoctoral researcher working with the team at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, said in a statement that before the CMS experimental results it was thought that the medium that will be created in a proton on lead collisions would be too small to create quark-gluon plasma.

"Indeed, collisions were being studied as reference for collisions of two lead nuclei to explore the non-quark-gluon-plasma aspects of collisions. Analysis presented in paper indicates, contrary to expectations, quark-gluon plasma can be created in very asymmetric proton on lead collisions", Wang said.

The senior scientists associated with the CMS detector said that this unexpected discovery will shed new light on high-energy physics.

Yen-Jie Lee, assistant professor of physics at MIT and co-convener of the CMS heavy-ion physics group, said this is the first ever paper that clearly shows that multiple particles are correlated to each other in proton-lead collisions, similar to what is observed in lead-lead collisions where quark gluon plasma is produced.

According to KU researcher, quark-gluon plasma is a very hot and dense state of matter of unbound quarks and gluons, which is not contained within individual nucleons.