I went to a talk about this about 6 months ago – very interesting
The main interest is in studying “warm dense matter”. What they mean by warm, and dense of course is different to everyday use. It is a strongly coupled plasma state such as you find in the interior of gas giants such as Jupiter
more info can be found at http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v5/n9/full/nphys1341.html
