We are excited to share the publication of our latest paper in Physical Review Letters, selected as an Editor’s Suggestion. In this work, we report groundbreaking evidence suggesting that quark-gluon plasma (QGP) droplets—previously thought to emerge only in larger systems—can form in systems as tiny as those initiated by a single parton. This discovery challenges conventional views on the conditions required to produce QGP, a state of matter that existed shortly after the Big Bang, and opens new avenues for exploring the strong force in unprecedented ways.

Using data collected by the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, we studied high-multiplicity jets and found compelling evidence of QCD collectivity in these small systems. This result not only advances our understanding of QGP formation but also highlights the potential of high-energy collisions to reveal new aspects of quantum chromodynamics.

This work was led by Dr. Austin Baty, a former Rice Academy Fellow and now Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), and Dr. Parker Gardner, a former Rice University graduate student and now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland.

Read the full article in Physical Review Letters here.