CERN’s ALICE reports smaller Big Bangs: oxygen and neon make quark-gluon plasma

CERN’s ALICE experiment has released new results from light-ion collisions run in July 2025, and they point to something striking: smashups involving oxygen-16 and neon-20 seem to produce quark-gluon plasma, the ultra-hot state thought to have filled the universe just after the Big Bang.

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What changes here is the scale. Physicists have usually needed much heavier ions, like lead or gold, to see this. But in 3 billion oxygen-oxygen collisions and 400 million neon-neon collisions recorded in July 2025, ALICE observed the same collective, fluid-like expansion, even though oxygen and neon nuclei are less than one-tenth the mass of lead. That pushes the “little big bang” boundary lower, adds to the case that real QGP-like behavior can survive in much smaller systems, and matches the August 2026 reports from the ALICE, ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb collaborations.

There’s a nuclear-structure angle to it, too. The particle spray appears to reflect the shapes of the nuclei, themselves: oxygen came out looking more rounded, while neon looked more elongated, closer to a bowling pin. If you follow CERN or early-universe physics, this result is worth your time, especially now that helium-4 is in the mix as a possible next test for where quark-gluon plasma formation finally gives out.

You can read the study in Physical Review Letters.