Extracting the speed of sound in quark-gluon plasma with ultrarelativistic lead-lead collisions at the LHC

The CMS Collaboration

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

Ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions create a strongly interacting state of hot and dense quark-gluon matter that exhibits a remarkable collective flow behavior with minimal viscous dissipation. To gain deeper insights into its intrinsic nature and fundamental degrees of freedom, we determine the speed of sound in an extended volume of quark-gluon plasma using lead-lead (PbPb) collisions at a center-of-mass energy per nucleon pair of 5.02 TeV. The data were recorded by the CMS experiment at the CERN LHC and correspond to an integrated luminosity of 0.607 nb−1. The measurement is performed by studying the multiplicity dependence of the average transverse momentum of charged particles emitted in head-on PbPb collisions. Our findings reveal that the speed of sound in this matter is nearly half the speed of light, with a squared value of 0.241 ±0.002(stat) ±0.016(syst) in natural units. The effective medium temperature, estimated using the mean transverse momentum, is 219 ±8(syst)MeV. The measured squared speed of sound at this temperature aligns precisely with predictions from lattice quantum chromodynamic (QCD) calculations. This result provides a stringent constraint on the equation of state of the created medium and direct evidence for a deconfined QCD phase being attained in relativistic nuclear collisions.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number077801
JournalReports on Progress in Physics
Volume87
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2024

Funding

Individuals have received support from the Marie-Curie program and the European Research Council and Horizon 2020 Grant, Contract Nos. 675440, 724704, 752730, 758316, 765710, 824093, and COST Action CA16108 (European Union); the Leventis Foundation; the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Science Committee, project no. 22rl-037 (Armenia); the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office; the Fonds pour la Formation \u00E0 la Recherche dans l\u2019Industrie et dans l\u2019Agriculture (FRIA-Belgium); the Agentschap voor Innovatie door Wetenschap en Technologie (IWT-Belgium); the F.R.S.-FNRS and FWO (Belgium) under the \u2018Excellence of Science\u2014EOS\u2019 \u2013 be.h project n. 30820817; the Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission, No. Z191100007219010 and Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (China); the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports (MEYS) of the Czech Republic; the Shota Rustaveli National Science Foundation, grant FR-22-985 (Georgia); the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), under Germany\u2019s Excellence Strategy\u2014EXC 2121 \u2018Quantum Universe\u2019\u2014390833306, and under Project Number 400140256\u2014GRK2497; the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI), Project Number 2288 (Greece); the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, the New National Excellence Program\u2014\u00DANKP, the NKFIH research grants K 124845, K 124850, K 128713, K 128786, K 129058, K 131991, K 133046, K 138136, K 143460, K 143477, 2020-2.2.1-ED-2021-00181, and TKP2021-NKTA-64 (Hungary); the Council of Science and Industrial Research, India; ICSC\u2014National Research Center for High Performance Computing, Big Data and Quantum Computing, funded by the Next GenerationEU program (Italy); the Latvian Council of Science; the Ministry of Education and Science, Project No. 2022/WK/14, and the National Science Center, Contracts Opus 2021/41/B/ST2/01369 and 2021/43/B/ST2/01552 (Poland); the Funda\u00E7\u00E3o para a Ci\u00EAncia e a Tecnologia, grant CEECIND/01334/2018 (Portugal); the National Priorities Research Program by Qatar National Research Fund; MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, ERDF \u2018a way of making Europe\u2019, and the Programa Estatal de Fomento de la Investigaci\u00F3n Cient\u00EDfica y T\u00E9cnica de Excelencia Mar\u00EDa de Maeztu, Grant MDM-2017-0765 and Programa Severo Ochoa del Principado de Asturias (Spain); the Chulalongkorn Academic into Its 2nd Century Project Advancement Project, and the National Science, Research and Innovation Fund via the Program Management Unit for Human Resources & Institutional Development, Research and Innovation, Grant B37G660013 (Thailand); the Kavli Foundation; the Nvidia Corporation; the SuperMicro Corporation; the Welch Foundation, contract C-1845; and the Weston Havens Foundation (USA). We congratulate our colleagues in the CERN accelerator departments for the excellent performance of the LHC and thank the technical and administrative staffs at CERN and at other CMS institutes for their contributions to the success of the CMS effort. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the computing centers and personnel of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid and other centers for delivering so effectively the computing infrastructure essential to our analyses. Finally, we acknowledge the enduring support for the construction and operation of the LHC, the CMS detector, and the supporting computing infrastructure provided by the following funding agencies: SC (Armenia), BMBWF and FWF (Austria); FNRS and FWO (Belgium); CNPq, CAPES, FAPERJ, FAPERGS, and FAPESP (Brazil); MES and BNSF (Bulgaria); CERN; CAS, MoST, and NSFC (China); MINCIENCIAS (Colombia); MSES and CSF (Croatia); RIF (Cyprus); SENESCYT (Ecuador); MoER, ERC PUT and ERDF (Estonia); Academy of Finland, MEC, and HIP (Finland); CEA and CNRS/IN2P3 (France); SRNSF (Georgia); BMBF, DFG, and HGF (Germany); GSRI (Greece); NKFIH (Hungary); DAE and DST (India); IPM (Iran); SFI (Ireland); INFN (Italy); MSIP and NRF (Republic of Korea); MES (Latvia); LAS (Lithuania); MOE and UM (Malaysia); BUAP, CINVESTAV, CONACYT, LNS, SEP, and UASLP-FAI (Mexico); MOS (Montenegro); MBIE (New Zealand); PAEC (Pakistan); MES and NSC (Poland); FCT (Portugal); MESTD (Serbia); MCIN/AEI and PCTI (Spain); MOSTR (Sri Lanka); Swiss Funding Agencies (Switzerland); MST (Taipei); MHESI and NSTDA (Thailand); TUBITAK and TENMAK (Turkey); NASU (Ukraine); STFC (United Kingdom); DOE and NSF (USA).

Keywords

  • CMS
  • QCD equation of state
  • quark-gluon plasma
  • speed of sound
  • ultra-central

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Physics and Astronomy

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