Heavy Ions

The Heavy Ion subprogram investigates the high temperature frontier of quantum chromodynamics (QCD), by trying to recreate and characterize new and predicted forms of matter and other new phenomena that might occur in extremely hot, dense nuclear matter and which have not existed since the Big Bang. Measurements are carried out primarily using relativistic heavy ion collisions at RHIC, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Participation in the heavy ion program at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) provides U.S. researchers the opportunity to search for new states of matter under substantially different initial conditions than those provided by RHIC, yet still provide information regarding the matter that existed during the infant universe.