Researchers create the smallest droplet of liquid ever seen Team recreated the world's tiniest droplets of a primordial state of matter they believe last existed moments after the Big Bang, some 13.82 billion years ago Drop is one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a virus Physicists may have created the smallest drops of liquid ever made in the lab. Researchers using the Large Hadron Collider in Cern say they create droplets three to five protons in size - 100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a virus. The droplets are believed to be similar to a primordial matter that existed immediately following the Big Bang, the team say. The tiniest droplets: A reconstruction of the collision that produced collective flow behavior. The green lines are the trajectories of the sub-atomic particles produced by the collision reconstructed by the CMS tracking system. The red and blue bars represent the energy measured by the instrument's two sets of calorimeters. CMS Collaboration This surprise result was achieved by firing proton 'bullets' into lead ions, creating a subatomic blood spatter-like effect. Evidence of the minuscule droplets was extracted from the results of colliding protons with lead ions at velocities approaching the speed of light. According to the scientists" calculations, these short-lived droplets are the size of three to five protons. To provide a sense of scale, that is about one-100,000th the size of a hydrogen atom or one-100,000,000th the size of a virus. 'With this discovery, we seem to be seeing the very origin of collective behavior,' said Julia Velkovska, professor of physics at Vanderbilt who led the study. Regardless of the material that we are using, collisions have to be violent enough to produce about 50 sub-atomic particles before we begin to see collective, flow-like behavior. A big machine for a tiny droplet: Part of the CMS experiment being moved into place. It contains the world's most powerful superconducting magnet, generating a field 100,000 times that of the Earth with enough energy to melt 18 tons of gold. These tiny droplets 'flow' in a manner similar to the behavior of the quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter that is a mixture of the sub-atomic particles that makes up protons and neutrons and only exists at extreme temperatures and densities - and many believe the entire universe once consisted of this strongly interacting elixir for fractions of a second after the Big Bang when conditions were dramatically hotter and denser than they are today. Now that the universe has spent billions of years expanding and cooling, the only way scientists can reproduce this primordial plasma is to bang atomic nuclei together with tremendous energy. In what was supposed to be a control run to check the validity of their lead-lead results, the scientists scheduled the collider to smash protons and lead nuclei together. They didn't expect to see any evidence of the plasma. Julia Velkovska, centre, in a room set up with telecommunications equipment that allows them to monitor of the detector's performance and directly download data Because the protons are so much lighter than lead nuclei (they have only one-208th the mass), it was generally agreed that proton-lead collisions couldn't release enough energy to produce the rare state of matter. 'The proton-lead collisions are something like shooting a bullet through an apple while lead-lead collisions are more like smashing two apples together: A lot more energy is released in the latter,' said Velkovska. After analyzing several billion events, they found hundreds of cases where the collisions produced more than 300 particles flowing together.