From the Search for Quark Matter to Cancer Therapy

From the Search for Quark Matter to Cancer Therapy: "The second important area in basic nuclear research at GSI is the investigation of hot, dense nuclear matter. Across the entire SIS energy range (and, beyond that, to the highest energies at CERN in Geneva), heavy ion beams are providing physicists with the opportunity of studying the multiple manifestations of nuclear matter, from its normal 'liquid' state to a gas composed of free nucleons, and on to the dissolution of nucleons in a quark-gluon plasma. This domain of investigation has likewise strong astrophysical implications, since scientists believe that a few fractions of a second after the big bang all the matter in the universe existed as a quark-gluon plasma. What’s more, the dramatic course of supernova explosions and the properties of the neutron stars to which they give rise are determined to a large extent by the behavior of compressed nuclear matter."