The following items have been supplied relating to the possibility of quark gluon plasma having been created in heavy ion experiments at CERN. The story recently appeared in the "Daily Mail", although it is unclear from where it first originated:
Earlier this week, rumours were flying that scientists at CERN, the huge underground accelerator laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, may have found a new kind of matter, unseen in nature since the very beginning of the universe. This kind of matter, called "quark-gluon" plasma, can only form under extremely severe conditions - at temperatures far hotter than even the centres of the brightest stars or supernovae - and had previously existed only in the primeval fireball of the Big Bang.
But now, by smashing together nuclei from lead atoms, physicists from CERN's NA50 experiment have been able to create a special super-hot sub-nuclear "soup", albeit in very small servings. Although existing over a very small volume and for an extremely short period of time, the colliding nuclei reached a staggering 30 million billion degrees centigrade - possibly hot enough to cause the quarks and gluon constituents of the nuclear protons and neutrons to "fuse" together, creating a quark-gluon plasma identical to that which existed a split-second after the creation of the universe. The physicists suspected that quark-gluon plasma had formed because the increased "stickiness" of the coalesced nuclei inhibits the emission of a special type of particle - called the J/psi - which is normally produced in this type of collision. The reduction in the numbers of these particles, or J/psi suppression as it is known in the trade, is especially indicative of the presence of quark-gluon plasma. This, coupled with complementary results from CERN's WA97 experiment, could well prove that quark-gluon plasma has been produced by the laboratory - the first to exist anywhere in the universe for billions of years.
Although expected by most physicists, the actual creation of quark-gluon plasma in the laboratory would mark a significant experimental breakthrough, confirming once again that all the theories are on the right track.