Submited by Roswell Man: Physicists say they have created a new state of hot, dense matter by crashing together the nuclei of gold atoms. The high-energy collisions prised open the nuclei to reveal their most basic particles, known as quarks and gluons. The researchers, at the US Brookhaven National Laboratory, say these particles were seen to behave as an almost perfect "liquid". The work is expected to help scientists explain the conditions that existed just milliseconds after the Big Bang. The details, presented to the American Physical Society in Florida, will be published across a number of papers in the journal Nuclear Physics A. They summarise the work of four collaborative experiments - dubbed Brahms, Phenix, Phobos and Star - which have been running on Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). community. "The experimental collaborations are still taking a cautious approach whereas people like me, who use model calculations, are already so excited about the data because we believe they have actually found the elusive state known as the quark-gluon plasma," commented theoretical nuclear physicist Steffen Bass from Duke University.
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