The collisions of gold nuclei produce matter as it existed shortly after the Big Bang.

This year, the physicists ran another series of experiments, slamming deuterons, smaller particles of one proton and one neutron, into gold nuclei.

One finding focused on the almond-shape region, possibly filled with plasma, created when two spherical gold nuclei strike each other, but not quite head on.

The accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, smashed the gold nuclei together at nearly the speed of light.

With huge supermagnets, RHIC accelerates beams of gold nuclei at almost the speed of light in opposite directions through two rings, each 2.4 miles around.

For example, the diameter of a gold nucleus is approximately 8.45 femtometres.

The collision between a pair of gold nuclei is a whopper on a subatomic scale.

So, Dr. Debbe said, the Brahms data indicated that the deuterons probably struck a color glass condensate inside the gold nuclei.

Rutherford was able to put an upper limit on the radius of the gold nucleus of 34 femtometres.

Most of the Brookhaven staff felt that if the quark-gluon fog was to be seen at all, it would come from the many runs using gold nuclei, carefully building up statistics.