Lead author Charles Arrowsmith, Department of Physics, University of OxfordBlack holes and neutron stars are the most compact objects in the universe. Now, for the first time, an international team of scientists has successfully created high-density plasma beams in the lab containing around 10 trillion electron-positron pairs. Lead investigator Professor Gianluca Gregori, Department of Physics, University of OxfordThe experiment produced a huge amount of electron-positron pairs using 300 billion protons from the SPS accelerator. Essentially, the beam generated at CERN had enough particles to start behaving like a true astrophysical plasma around a black hole. This brings together researchers from across the Department of Physics, one of the largest in the world.
