At the center of the Earth, matter is crushed under pressures millions of times higher than we experience here on the surface. Pressures in the cores of stars and giant planets are even more extreme. To understand how the Earth, Jupiter, and even larger planets outside our solar system came to be, we need to understand the behavior of materials in these extreme conditions. Here at SLAC, we have found ways to push matter to these tremendous temperatures and pressures, if only for very short periods of time. This lecture will describe some of the surprising and even bizarre states of matter we can now create in the laboratory.
