Oxygen collisions recreate Big Bang-era matter at lower energies

Physicists at the STAR experiment at Brookhaven's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider found strong evidence of quark-gluon plasma, the hot, dense matter of the early universe, by smashing oxygen nuclei at nearly light speed. They observed jet quenching at energies much lower than earlier oxygen tests at CERN, setting a new lower limit for creating the plasma. The work appears in Physical Review Letters.