By Peter Weiss
Detectors at a giant particle collider have recorded apparent evidence for an exotic form of nuclear matter that scientists compare to a slab of pudding moving at nearly the speed of light.
Motes of that extraordinary stuff may have formed briefly at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., where scientists propel nuclei to enormous velocities in the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider (RHIC).
Last month at the Quark Matter 2004 conference in Oakland, Calif., RHIC scientists described new hints of what’s known in physics-speak as a color glass condensate.