The method can be applied to analyzing additional data from RHIC as well as data collected from nuclear collisions at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It will also have relevance to future explorations of nuclei at the Electron-Ion Collider, a nuclear physics facility in the design stage at Brookhaven Lab.
“Ultimately, since 99.9% of the visible matter that people and all the stars and planets of the cosmos are made of resides in the nuclei at the center of atoms, understanding these nuclear building blocks is at the heart of understanding who we are,” added the press release.