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Physicists hoping to produce a quark-gluon plasma—the soup of particles
that existed shortly after the big bang—may take a bit longer than
expected. A flagging research budget at the US Department of Energy means that
their experiments, which involve smashing gold ions together in the
3.8-kilometre-long Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National
Laboratory near New York, will run for no more than 12 weeks in 2002, says T.
James Symons, head of the DOE’s nuclear science advisory committee. That’s less
than half the planned running time, Symons told a congressional subcommittee
last week.