In accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, heavy nuclei collide at enormous speeds. For an instant, quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is born — a state of matter where quarks and gluons float freely, just like in the first microseconds after the birth of the universe.
This plasma is not just hot. It also spins at a furious rate — up to 10²² revolutions per second. For comparison, the fastest man-made top spins at about 10⁵ revolutions per second. The difference is like comparing the sweep of a clock's hand to a lightning flash. But that's not the surprising part. What's surprising is that the plasma doesn't fly apart despite such spinning. The authors of a new study have found the answer: the expansion itself is to blame.
In ordinary fluids, vortex tubes (thin cords of rotating matter) can twist and stretch, which amplifies rotation. But in QGP, it's different. Its explosive expansion acts as an invisible geometric safeguard: it 'dilutes' the vortices, preventing them from growing spontaneously. Viscosity is almost irrelevant here — pure geometry of the expansion decides everything.
Thus, nature stages an elegant experiment: the strongest vortex in the universe hides itself. To see it, detectors at the LHC and RHIC collider have to catch the subtlest angular shifts of particles. It's like trying to hear a whisper in a thunderstorm, but this is how physicists learn to read the history of the first moments of matter.
The rotation speed of quark-gluon plasma is 10 billion times faster than the rotation of the fastest pulsars — neutron stars, which are already considered cosmic tops.