Argonne researchers played a significant role in research that led to the surprising finding of a possible ideal liquid instead of the expected quark-gluon plasma at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).
On April 18, each of the four major experiments at RHIC released white papers summarizing the first four years of RHIC operation and their findings from high-energy collisions of gold nuclei. At the incredibly high temperatures and pressures created in the collisions, physicists expected to create "quark-gluon plasma" - a gaseous state of matter thought to have existed in the first few microseconds after the Big Bang. Instead, the matter created inside the detectors behaved like a liquid - a completely unexpected result.