2 February

As physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory continually upgrade the $1.1 billion Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) and the two big particle detectors it feeds, known as STAR and PHENIX, they hope to map out the relationship between ordinary nuclear matter made of protons and neutrons and the quark-gluon plasma, which may be analogous to the relationship between liquid water and steam. They are also planning a $500 million upgrade for early next decade that would enable the collider to answer a key puzzle about the proton itself—if RHIC doesn’t fall victim to budget cuts. (Subscription required)

The question of whether normal matter’s shadowy counterpart anti-matter exerts a kind of “anti-gravity” is set to be answered, according to a new report.

In addition, the closure of the Tevatron, Fermilab’s particle collider, in 2011, means that the United States risks being left without a large-scale particle-physics experiment, and young experimentalists will have to go to Europe to work on the Large Hadron Collider.

KEK is upgrading its B factory to provide a 40-fold increase in luminosity by using a large crossing-angle and squeezing the beams down to nanometres. The Belle experiment will also see a second incarnation.