Scientists May Have Discovered New Form of "Spooky" Matter
Particles interacting with each other without any observable direct connection
Recent experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Switzerland —the same famous facility that discovered the elusive Higgs boson earlier this year— may have discovered a new type of matter in which particles seemingly interact without any direct connection with each other: "color-glass condensate".
The LHC routinely smashes particles together in high-speed collisions, which promptly breaks the particles up into their constituent sub-particles. Normally, these "shrapnel" fly away in all directions, much like the debris in a car crash. But scientists observing the collision using the LHC's Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) found some pairs of particles that flew away from each other in an orderly, correlated manner —almost as if they knew what the other was doing, even though they were not directly connected to each other.
