Number 207 (Story #3), December 15, 1994 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE HIGHEST ENERGY ACCELERATOR BEAM in the world is at CERN, where lead ions achieve energies as high as 35 TeV. The Tevatron at Fermilab still possesses beams with the highest energy per nucleon, 900 GeV, but CERN's lead ions (each consisting of 208 nucleons) have more total energy. CERN researchers hope that collisions involving their lead ions will provide the first tangible evidence for quark-gluon plasma, the hypothetical state of matter in which quarks do not necessarily configure themselves into the conventional groupings of two quarks (mesons) and three quarks (baryons). (CERN press release, November 21, 1994.)