"Revving Up the LHC: Lead-Ion Collisions Begin"

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN has begun its first heavy-ion run in five years, with stable beams of lead nuclei colliding at an increased energy of 5.36 TeV per nucleon pair. The primary goal of this run is to study quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter believed to have existed shortly after the Big Bang. The ongoing run is expected to bring significant advances in our understanding of quark-gluon plasma, with upgrades in the experiments' detection and analysis systems. The experiments will also study ultra-peripheral collisions of heavy ions to probe gluonic matter and study rare phenomena.