Narrator: This is Science Today. A particle accelerator at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has recently produced the highest density of matter ever created in an experiment. Daniel Cebra, a physicist at the University of California, Davis - who participated in a similar experiment last year, says a new state of matter, can improve our understanding of how the universe was created.

Cebra: To put this whole thing in a framework, we're trying to understand big bang cosmology and matter at the very beginning of time.

Narrator: Normal matter consists of protons and neutrons that make up the nuclei at the core of atoms. But going back in time, when conditions were hotter and denser, these protons and neutrons were broken apart into what are called quarks and gluons. Cebra says understanding this state would shed light on where some of the universe's initial, non-uniformity's came from.

Cebra: That can then be modeled into one's models of cosmological expansion. To get an idea of why the universe looks the way that it does.

Narrator: For Science Today, I'm Larissa Branin.