The Big Bang on the laboratory bench

For a few fractions of a second after the Big-Bang, the temperature of the universe reached several thousands milliards degrees and till now quarks and gluons have been thought to be dissociated in a kind of primordial plasma but recent experimental results from the RHIC (relativistic heavy ions collider in Brookhaven) show that the quark and gluon plasma flows like a fluid and that the interaction between quarks generates that flow. Another feature of the quark and gluon plasma is an ability to behave like an almost perfect gas: it shows very low viscosity and reaches thermal equilibrium very quickly. Alice, a huge particle detection system that will equip the future LHC (large hadron collider in CERN), will shed light on an energy range that has been scarcely touched by RHIC. Confirmation of RHIC results is expected but the discovery of totally new phenomena like the creation of mini black holes or the existence of extra spatial dimensions remains possible. Another issue concerns nucleosynthesis and the problem that nuclear models predict a ratio of helium 7 in stars 3 times as high as what is really found in the oldest stars of our galaxy. (A.C.)