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 quark–gluon 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.
"The theory that describes the color force is called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD," says Nu Xu of the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the spokesperson for the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory. "QCD has been extremely successful at explaining interactions of quarks and gluons at short distances, such as high-energy proton and antiproton collisions at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. But in bulk collections of matter – including the quark-gluon plasma – at longer distances or smaller momentum transfer, an approach called lattice gauge theory has to be used."
Until recently, lattice QCD calculations of hot, dense, bulk matter could not be tested against experiment. Beginning in 2000, however, RHIC was able to recreate the extreme conditions of the early universe in miniature, by colliding massive gold nuclei (heavy ions) at high energies.
Experimentalists at RHIC, working with theorist Sourendu Gupta of India's Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, have recently compared lattice-theory predictions about the nature of the quark-gluon plasma with certain STAR experimental results for the first time. In so doing they have established the temperature boundary where ordinary matter and quark matter cross over and change phase. Their results appear in the journal Science.
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