What: UC Davis physics professor Daniel Ferenc and others will describe the importance of Wednesday's announcement by CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, that a new state of matter has been discovered. Since 1985, Ferenc and other UC Davis professors have been collaborators in the experiments that produced the new discovery. The new findings advance our understanding of how the universe was created, by filling in the events that occurred between a time just milliseconds after the Big Bang (the explosion 15 billion to 20 billion years ago that gave rise to the universe) to a point about three minutes afterward. Specifically, the researchers have found compelling evidence for the existence of a new state of matter in which subatomic particles called quarks, instead of being bound up into more complex particles such as protons and neutrons, are liberated to roam freely. Theory had predicted that this state must have existed, but until now it had not been confirmed experimentally. When: 2 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 10 Where: On the UC Davis campus, in a room to be determined. Background: The aim of CERN's Heavy Ion Program was to collide lead ions inside a particle accelerator, creating immensely high energy densities that would break down the forces that confined quarks inside more complex particles. Seven detectors were set up to record the results of those collisions. UC Davis physicists worked on experiments at three of those seven detectors. The collisions created temperatures more than 100,000 times as hot as the center of the sun, and energy densities 20 times that of ordinary nuclear matter -- densities that have never before been reached in laboratory experiments. They yielded compelling evidence that a new state of matter was created in the collisions. This state of matter features many of the characteristics of "quark-gluon plasma," the primordial soup in which quarks and gluons existed before they clumped together as the universe cooled down. The project is an excellent example of collaboration in physics research. Scientists from institutes in over 20 countries participated, including those from five universities in the United States. Directions: Contact Sylvia Wright for directions to the news conference location on the UC Davis campus.