Physicists used a quantum simulator — a device that mimics the behavior of charged particles, to study their collisions at enormous energies. According to the Standard Model, the laws of the micro-world, the system should quickly transition to chaos, where disorder is maximal. But that's not what happened.
Particles flew apart like fragments of an explosion, retaining memory of the initial charge clumps. This plasma expanded in ordered streams, like people who, after an alarm, run not in panic but in groups, staying close to friends. Scientists called this ballistic plasma with long-term memory.
The clue came from the ideas of Schwinger and Wigner: the plasma oscillated — the electric field and particle current exchanged energy, like a pendulum. Using laser physics methods developed by Glauber, physicists saw these oscillations in the blurred picture of particle velocities and positions. It turned out that mysterious quantum scars are also such ordered plasma states. This experiment shows how precise simulations overturn notions of matter under extreme conditions.
Quark-gluon plasma is a state in which particles normally locked inside protons move freely; such plasma existed just after the Big Bang.