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04 February 2026 Particle collisions cast light on how matter forms from seemingly empty space Fundamental particles called quarks can be created in quantum-correlated pairs. These correlations can be passed on to larger particles that form from the quarks. By Yasmine Amhis ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4282-1512 0 Yasmine Amhis Yasmine Amhis is at the Laboratory of the Physics of the Two Infinities Irène Joliot-Curie, Paris-Saclay University, Orsay, 91400, France. View author publications PubMed Google Scholar
In the moments after the Big Bang, most of the visible matter in the present-day Universe existed as a hot ‘soup’ that included fundamental particles called quarks. As the Universe cooled, the quarks bound together to form composite particles known as hadrons, which include protons and neutrons. The mechanism of hadron formation is not fully understood, but, writing in Nature, the STAR Collaboration1 reports observations of hadrons forming after high-energy particle collisions, from pairs of quarks with properties that are correlated through quantum physics, and which are created from the vacuum of seemingly empty space.
Nature 650, 44-45 (2026)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00036-7
References STAR Collaboration. Nature 650, 65–71 (2026). Greensite, J. An Introduction to the Confinement Problem 2nd edn (Springer, 2020). Gross, D. J. & Wilczek, F. Phys. Rev. Lett. 30, 1343–1346 (1973). Politzer, H. D. Phys. Rev. Lett. 30, 1346–1349 (1973). Gross, D. J. & Wilczek, F. Phys. Rev. D 8, 3633–3652 (1973). Ackermann, K. H. et al. Nucl. Instrum. Methods Phys. Res. A 499, 624–632 (2003). Download references
Competing Interests The author declares no competing interests.
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