All matter around us is composed of atoms. Each atom is made up of yet smaller parts, protons, neutrons, and electrons. More fundamentally, protons and neutrons are made up of quarks (3 quarks each). The force that binds the protons and neutrons inside the nucleus of an atom is called the strong nuclear force, and has a particle equivalent called the gluon. Scientists believe that at the time of the creation of our Universe (that is, the Big Bang), the energies were so high that protons and neutrons were melted into constituent quarks and gluons, thus forming a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). Now for the first time, such primordial matter might have been created in a lab :).

Quark Gluon Plasma (Courtesy: PPARC)An international team of physicists working at the RHIC (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory says it has found strong evidence for the QGP. Interestingly, instead of behaving like free particles, the quarks, antiquarks, and gluons behaved more like a liquid! The results were presented at the April meeting of the American Physical Society.
RHIC uses accelerators to increase the energies of gold atoms up to 100 billion electron volts inside a 4-kilometre ring and then collides them together. When a gold nucleus collides with another gold nucleus the constituent protons and neutrons are thought to melt together to form a QGP. The new material formed deviates from our current understanding of how a QGP should behave. This is exciting news, as it means that there are some things that are still not clear, and therefore more study is necessary to understand the underlying processes that govern our world at its smallest!