Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang Machine

Densest Matter Created in Big-Bang Machine: Some theories predict that, in the extreme heat of the very early universe, quarks and gluons would have been even more widely spaced, creating a quark-gluon plasma that behaved like a gas. The ALICE team is therefore looking for evidence of gas-like behavior in the early stages of their quark-gluon plasma formation...
"It could well be that in the very early stages [of our quark-gluon plasma], it's behaving more like a gas, and then as it cools it turns into a liquid, but we will need to investigate this further..."
If this gas-to-liquid transition has indeed been observed, it would be surprising, since theory predicts that it should occur at much higher temperatures than those currently being produced at the LHC, said Thomas Ludlam, chair of the physics department at Brookhaven.

The bouncing gas

The bouncing gas: In this study, the researchers set out to model strongly interacting systems, using lithium gas atoms to stand in for electrons. By tuning the lithium atoms’ energy states with a magnetic field, they made the atoms interact with each other as strongly as the laws of nature allow: they scatter every time they encounter another atom.

To eliminate any effects of temperature, the researchers cooled the gas to about 100 billionths of one Kelvin, close to absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius). They used magnetic forces to separate the gas into two clouds, labeled “spin up” and “spin down,” then made the clouds collide in a trap formed by laser light. Instead of passing through each other, as gases would normally do, the clouds repelled in dramatic fashion.

Heaviest Antimatter Found; Made in U.S. Atom Smasher

Heaviest Antimatter Found; Made in U.S. Atom Smasher: Dubbed the antihypertriton, the newfound antimatter is the heaviest yet detected. What's more, it's the first type of particle that contains what's called an antistrange quark, which puts the antihypertriton in a new plane on the periodic table of elements.

Early universe recreated in LHC was superhot liquid - physics-math - 25 November 2010 - New Scientist

Early universe recreated in LHC was superhot liquid: Some models had indicated that if higher energies were used, viscosity values – resistance to flow of a fluid – would indicate the presence of a gas. "At the time, the RHIC results already surprised us," says Evans. "But our data still seem to show that the quark-gluon plasma flows like a superhot liquid."

Grant advances quark-gluon plasma studies

Grant advances quark-gluon plasma studies: In 2005, RHIC announced the breakthrough discovery of a quark-gluon plasma, a dense, high-energy state of matter believed to have existed in the first milliseconds after the Big Bang. Scientists referred to the very hot material created in the lab -- 150,000 times hotter than the sun's core -- as a "perfect liquid," one with practically no viscosity, or as little as quantum physics will allow. Such properties were quite a surprise, Geurts said, because original expectations were that this phase of matter would behave much more like a gas.