Quark-gluon plasma is a superheated, high-density mass of quarks and gluons which is believed to have existed during the first 20 or 30 microseconds of the Universe's existence. In such a mass the conditions for asymptotic freedom would hold, and as a result, confinement would become irrelevant. This is believed to be the only way that free quarks could exist. It is named by analogy with traditional plasma in which normal bonds between electrons and nuclei are broken.
It is also called the deconfining phase of QCD.
Its existence has been tentatively confirmed by results obtained at Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). It has also been hypothesized that the tentatively observed QCD fireball at RHIC may itself be the analog of a micro black hole. The results will be published across a number of papers in the journal Nuclear Physics A .
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