Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory
Scientists seeking to plot points on the nuclear phase diagram — a map of the different states of nuclear matter and transitions among them under different conditions of temperature and density — have new signposts (curved line) to look for as they search for evidence of a “critical point.” (LHC green oval = matter found by the Large Hadron Collider; RHIC = matter found by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider.)