Quark-gluon plasma

Thanks fo @cHaOsOfWar for this subject. Go check out his stories that introduce his unique theories about how the universe works.

What the heck is a quark-gluon plasma? This sounds like a unique Anime type weapon.

Actually, it's a special form of quantum matter that exists only at high temperatures and densities. This sort of plasma is probably what existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang because it contains quarks and antiquarks with slightly more quarks.

First of all, we must understand that quarks and gluons are quantum particles that make up baryonic matter, which is the kind of matter we're made out of. As you might know quarks come in different flavors and colors. They are the constituents of hadrons like protons and neutrons that go into making baryonic matter like atoms.
So what is a quark-gluon plasma? Well, for one thing the quarks are deconfined. In normal matter like hadrons, the quarks are confined. What does this mean?

Confinement means that the quarks cannot be isolated singularly, which means that they can never be observed. In other words the quarks are clumped together and can't be separated. This has something to do with the gluons that bind these quarks together. When the quarks are deconifined they become separate from the gluons, which are the bosons, or force carriers, that hold these quarks together.

What this involves in the case of a quark-gluon plasma is that it becomes a perfect dense fluid. However, one must heat up matter to temperatures of 2 times 10 to the 12th power K. That's a temperature that is higher than at the core of our sun. The only way to accomplish this is in a particle accelerator like the Hadron collider. When two nuclei collide it causes a fireball and this fireball represents the quark-gluon plasma.

This stuff is like crazy putty for quantum physicists. It has all sorts of weird properties, but the best of these is strange, as in the creation of strange matter, which contain strange and charm quarks. Strange matter cannot normally exist for any length of time. There is a theory that says that strange matter can infect normal matter and cause a complete quantum conversion of the universe. So far, this is just a theory.

All of this is theoretical, but there is experimental evidence for quark-gluon plasma existence. The reason why physicists are interested in it is because it may have been created at the time of the Big Bang. Understanding it would go a long way in understanding how the Big Bang happened and how the resulting universe expanded.

Thanks for reading.