THE search for quark-gluon plasma, the ultra-hot soup of matter that filled
the Universe for its first few microseconds, is turning into a war of words
between rival teams of physicists in the US and Europe.
At last week’s Quark Matter 2001 conference at the State University of New
York, Stony Brook, researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long
Island reported the first data from their year-old accelerator, the Relativistic
Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), which slams gold ions together at near light speed.
The results showed intriguing hints that the machine could be making the
long-sought plasma.
Meanwhile, researchers from…
