Scientists Serve Up 'Perfect' Liquid

Excerpted from Science News Daily.

"New state of matter more remarkable than predicted -- raising many new questions

The four detector groups conducting research at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- a giant atom "smasher" located at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory -- say they’ve created a new state of hot, dense matter out of the quarks and gluons that are the basic particles of atomic nuclei, but it is a state quite different and even more remarkable than had been predicted. In peer-reviewed papers summarizing the first three years of RHIC findings, the scientists say that instead of behaving like a gas of free quarks and gluons, as was expected, the matter created in RHIC’s heavy ion collisions appears to be more like a liquid..." Continue article.