When matter melts: Physicists map phase changes in quark-gluon plasma
Thursday, June 23, 2011 - 13:31
in Physics & Chemistry
In its infancy, when the universe was a few millionths of a second old, the elemental constituents of matter moved freely in a hot, dense soup of quarks and gluons. As the universe expanded, this quarkgluon plasma quickly cooled, and protons and neutrons and other forms of normal matter "froze out": the quarks became bound together by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the color force.