Any conclusive proof of the condensate would have an impact both on how we understand particle production in collisions as well as the ways gluons and quarks are arranged inside protons.
Although the theory that describes the interaction of quarks and gluons is on a firm conceptual footing, it is so complicated in practice that it can take years to make a single calculation of something like the shape of a proton even using the most powerful supercomputers.
After orchestrating 2 million collisions between lead nuclei and protons, like the sort you see above, the collider's Compact Muon Solenoid group and researchers at MIT suspect that stray, linked pairs of gluon particles in the mix were signs of color-glass condensate, a currently theory-only form of matter that sees gluons travel in liquid-like, quantum-entangled waves.