What happens to ordinary matter as you heat it to higher and higher temperatures, or compress it to greater and greater densities? This simple question underpins a major effort to create extreme conditions in the lab, which has recently taken the shape of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). This machine has been colliding gold nuclei since 2000, and has produced tantalizing hints that a new state of matter - the quark-gluon plasma - is created in the reactions. But it has also sparked surprises that are sending researchers back to the drawing board.
Thomas Schaefer, in the Department of Physics at North Carolina State University reports on these latest exciting developments in the June issue of Physics World.