Vicki Greene and Charlie Maguire are members of an elite, international cadre of physicists who are trying to create and characterize an exotic state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma. The scientists are not ready to proclaim they have succeeded in reproducing this primordial plasma. But the results of the last two series of experiments that they have run on the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider make it highly likely that this is the case.

By David F. Salisbury
September 3, 2003