For the last five weeks, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) delivered lead-ion beams to the experiments, marking the first-ever heavy-ion run at the record energy of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair and the first of the LHC Run 3.

By observing the particles created in lead-lead collisions in the LHC, physicists at CERN aim to study specific phenomena, such as quark-gluon plasma, a hot and dense state of matter thought to have existed for a few millionths of a second in the early Universe, shortly after the Big Bang.

The season of heavy-ion physics will come to an end on 30 October at 6 a.m. CET.

Join CERN on Thursday, 2 November, at 3 p.m. CET, live from the CERN Control Centre (CCC), where scientists from the LHC experiments and other experts will answer your questions about heavy-ion physics and the data they were able to collect this season. 

The event will be broadcasted on CERN’s Twitter/X, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. 

Watch the video below showing the beginning of the lead-ion run at the LHC after 5 years.