The different energy ranges reveal different aspects of the plasma. Raghav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli, a physicist at Vanderbilt University, did their Ph.D. work at the LHC, but recently became a member of the STAR and sPHENIX collaborations to focus on the particles coming out of lower-energy collisions. “They are closer to the scale of the plasma; they talk to it a lot more,” Kunnawalkam Elayavalli says. “Think of it like a party: there's a lot of people, and you're making a beeline to the exit. But if you're kind of slow and you don't want to leave that fast, you get a chance to talk to people on your way out.” Because particles flying through the quark-gluon plasma at RHIC take longer to move through it, they can extract more information from it. “The things we're trying to measure are the transport properties—the average distance you can go without interacting with another particle,” they add. “It tells us about the fundamental scale of the plasma.”