Prefer particle physics to poker? Pick up a deck of the Quark Matter Card Game, and you can have both. Instead of kings and queens, the cards feature quarks (up, down, and strange); muons, electrons, and their neutrinos; and antiparticles for all. Hungarian high school students Csaba Torok and ]udit Csorgo invented the deck with Judit's father, Tamas, a physicist at the KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics in Budapest. The simplest game is "Anti," in which players quickly identify particle and antiparticle combinations, bearing in mind a quantum-mechanical property called "color" indicated by the color of the card. It's an abstract concept, but "even children who cannot read can learn the rules," Tamas says. For adult players, he recommends "Quark Matter/' which starts with cards densely piled to represent the quark-gluon plasmas physicists cook up at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), where Tamas works on the PHENIX experiment. Players draw cards according to the physics of how the plasma expands and reforms into particles known as hadrons.
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