[link to arstechnica.com]

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So far, the LHC has been spending its time ramming protons together, leaving Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) the king of the hill when it comes to smashing larger atomic nuclei. When the nuclei of gold atoms collide within RHIC, their components dissolve into a high-energy state called a quark-gluon plasma (the LHC will eventually smash lead atoms to similar effect). A paper in today's Science describes some of the more exotic items that briefly emerge from the wreckage: the antiparticle equivalent of Deuterium, with strange quarks replacing some of the more familiar ones.