The Phases of Strongly Interacting Matter

In the first microseconds after the Big Bang, before the quarks joined together to form hadrons, the Universe was composed of a primordial soup of deconfined quarks and gluons, known as the quark-gluon plasma.

Studies of this phase of matter therefore have great potential to further our understanding of the development of the early Universe.

It is possible to use colliding beams of nuclei at high energies to wind back the clock and replicate these conditions. This could provide a new experimental platform from which to test the theory of QCD, and to find out the point at which the transition between hadronic matter and deconfinement occurs.