Number 197 (Story #1), October 5, 1994 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein QUARK GLUON PLASMA (QGP) is a hypothetical state of nuclear matter in which quarks do not reside in the traditional three-quark bundles (nucleons) or two-quark bundles (mesons) but rather mingle in an amorphous soup. Scientists are trying to create the QGP state by colliding heavy ions together. According to Dinesh Srivastava and Bikash Sinha, physicists at the Cyclotron Centre in Calcutta, India, evidence for the transition from a hadron phase (nucleons and mesons) into a QGP phase would consist of (1) an enhanced production of strange mesons, (2) a decrease in the production of psi mesons, and (3) an increase in the creation of photons and lepton-antilepton pairs. Interpreting the data from a recent experiment (WA80) at CERN, one in which single photons emanated from high-energy sulphur-gold collisions, Srivastava and Sinha surmise that the data can best be described by a scenario in which a plasma does indeed form, after which the plasma expands, cools, and freezes into hadrons. (Physical Review Letters, 17 October.)