An international team of scientists involving epp team researchers Nitin Shukla, Jorge Vieira and Luís Silva recently announced the discovery of a new state of matter, which is electrically neutral and containing equal parts of matter and anti-matter. This new substance had never been observed before, and has been subject of many theories that predict that it could be observed near the boundary of black holes and produced through violent astrophysical explosions. Experiments combined with massive particle-in-cell simulations have now shown that this exotic substance could be produced when an intense laser propagates in a plasma producing ultra-relativistic electrons that can then be transformed in a fireball electron-positron beam with equal parts of matter and anti-matter. These results were published in Nature Communications. The paper can be found here.