Quark gluon plasma

A quark–gluon plasma (QGP) or quark soup is a state of matter in quantum chromodynamics (QCD) which exists at extremely high temperature and/or density. This state is thought to consist of asymptotically free strong-interacting quarks and gluons, which are ordinarily confined by color confinement inside atomic nuclei or other hadrons. This is in analogy with the conventional plasma where nuclei and electrons, confined inside atoms by electromagnetism at ambient conditions, can move freely. Artificial quark matter, which has been produced at Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and CERN's Large Hadron Collider, can only be produced in minute quantities and is unstable and impossible to contain, and will radioactively decay within a fraction of a second into stable particles through hadronization; the produced hadrons or their decay products and gamma rays can then be detected. In the quark matter phase diagram, QGP is placed in the high-temperature, high-density regime; whereas, ordinary matter is a cold and rarefied mixture of nuclei and vacuum, and the hypothetical quark stars would consist of relatively cold, but dense quark matter. It is believed that up to a few milliseconds after the Big Bang, known as the quark epoch, the Universe was in a quark–gluon plasma state.

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