At extremely high temperatures and densities, protons and neutrons may dissolve into a "soup" of quarks and gluons, called the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). For a few microseconds, shortly after the Big Bang, the Universe was filled with the QGP matter.
The search and study of Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is one of the most fundamental research topics of our times. The QGP matter has been probed by colliding heavy ions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory, New York and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva. By colliding heavy-ions at a speed close to that of light, scientists aim to obtain - albeit over a tiny volume of the size of a nucleus and for an infinitesimally short instant - a QGP state. This QGP state can be observed by dedicated experiments, as it reverts to hadronic matter through expansion and cooling. This volume presents some of the current theoretical and experimental understandings in the field of QGP.
