Mini Big Bang Created, Puzzling Results Too Explosive
By Michael Schirber
Staff Writer
posted: 21 March 2005
06:27 am ET

What do you get when you turn the temperature up to a trillion degrees?

Quite a heating bill.

Actually physicists claim that at this temperature nuclear material melts into an exotic form of matter called a quark-gluon plasma – thought to have been the state of the universe a microsecond after the Big Bang.

Recreating this primordial soup is the primary purpose of the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory. After five years of data, it appears as if RHIC may have succeeded.

But a big mystery looms over the detection: the putative plasma explodes more violently than predicted.

"We expected to bring the nuclear liquid to a boil and produce a steam of quark-gluon plasma," said John Cramer from the University of Washington. "Instead, the boiler seems to be blowing up in our faces."

More at: http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050321_big_bang.html