RHIC collision gif (IMAGE)

DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory

RHIC collision gif

Caption

Collisions of heavy ions (the nuclei of atoms) at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) recreate matter as it existed just after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago. The collisions "set free" the quarks and gluons that make up the protons and neutrons of the nuclei. The result is a hot soup of these fundamental particles, a quark-gluon plasma (QGP).

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Brookhaven National Laboratory

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