In recent years physicists have created the densest and hottest matter in the universe -- the quark-gluon plasma -- in ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions. This new state of matter is also the primary substance in the deep interiors of neutron stars. At the same time new states of ultracold matter have been created in trapped atomic gases.
This talk will describe the physics of these new forms of matter, and highlight unexpected connections between them that provide, for example, insights into how nuclear matter deconfines into quark matter with increasing density in neutron stars.

By Gordon Baym (Department of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign