Collisions of heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, reproduce the extreme conditions that existed in the Universe just after the big bang. These conditions enable the creation of hypernuclei, nuclei containing protons, neutrons, and their heavier, shorter-lived cousins, hyperons, which consist of up, down, and strange quarks. Now, by studying these heavy-ion collisions, the ALICE Collaboration has measured—with a statistical significance of 3 sigma—a hypernucleus called antihyperhelium-4 [1]. The team’s measurements of that hypernucleus and others could constrain models of particle physics and of neutron stars.
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