Here beneath the hushed pine barrens of Long Island, scientists first recreated the conditions of the big bang. Using an atom smasher called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicists melted atomic nuclei to produce a soup of particles called a quark-gluon plasma, the same stuff that filled space a microsecond after the cosmos's birth. Over the past decade those experiments have given researchers a new perspective on the strong nuclear force that binds 99.95% of ordinary matter. "RHIC has been enormously productive and has established leadership in pioneering a new field of nuclear physics," says Steven Vigdor, Brookhaven's associate director for nuclear and particle physics.
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