Matter

Physicists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have smashed the nuclei of gold atoms together at near the speed of light to produce the highest density of matter ever artificially created, it was announced Tuesday. The density was more than 20 times as great as that within the nuclei of ordinary matter and produced temperatures above 1 trillion degrees.

Physicists said they had created a new form of matter strongly resembling the stuff of the universe one-thousandth of a second after its birth. This matter -- created in a project at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton -- is called quark-gluon plasma, and physicists believe it is crucial to understanding the dawn of the universe and the interior of atomic nuclei.

"It's the ultimate insult," said Thomas Weiler, visiting professor at the University of Hawaii, as he considered evidence that almost all of the universe is made of exotic matter different from that making up stars, the Earth and people. Mounting evidence suggests that as much as 99% of the universe's matter may be exotic, infinitesimal particles that pervade space, undetected except for their gravitational effect on stars.

A central piece of a major scientific puzzle fell into place Friday when physicists announced experimental results confirming a basic theory about how matter was created in the first moments after the Big Bang. The results, released by an international collaboration based at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, do not completely explain the mystery--indeed, as with many scientific discoveries, the new findings created even juicier mysteries.

Last month physicists at the University of Colorado chilled a batch of atoms to the coldest temperatures ever achieved on Earth--or anywhere else in the universe, for that matter. Any day now, they're hoping to get the atoms cold enough to freeze into an entirely new state of matter. This feat of unnatural frigidity consumed six years and more than half a million dollars. Physicists are suitably impressed. But lay people might well want to ask: What's the point?

In a discovery that experts are calling breathtaking and beautiful--and of "Nobel Prize caliber"--physicists at the University of Colorado at Boulder have created an entirely new state of matter. It exists only in the coldest spot in the universe, which is currently a carrot-size tube in the laboratory of physicists Carl Weiman and Eric Cornell.

A coveted antimatter research project awarded Monday to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center aims to answer one of the most fundamental questions about the universe: Why does matter exist? Scientists will analyze millions of special subatomic particles called B mesons to compare the behavior of matter and antimatter. They hope they can understand how a universe of physical stuff--stars, planets and people--emerged from the primal fireball of the Big Bang.

A promising theory that some scientists hoped might explain the nature of the invisible matter that makes up 90% of the universe has been all but destroyed by data collected during last month's astronomy mission aboard the space shuttle Discovery, scientists said Thursday.

Ever since physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced in April that they had detected "strong evidence" for the final particle in the subatomic puzzle, physics watchers have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This week, the sound of shoes dropping will be heard worldwide with the expected announcement that 900 collaborators in two simultaneous experiments have found the long-sought "top quark."