Quark Gluon Plasma

At low temperatures the quarks cannot move freely and they are confined into hadrons, but at high enough temperatures of about 100 MeV or $10^{12}{\rm K}$, it is believed that quarks and qluons interact weakly and the situation is very different from the hadronic world where we live. This state of matter is called the quark-gluon plasma and it is believed that it has existed at the later stages of the evolution of the universe as it was cooling down after the hot big bang. This phase of matter is expected to be produced in the laboratory in relativistic heavy ion collisions at Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US or the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Geneva in experiments planned for the near future. We will then be able to test our predictions about the the physics of chiral symmetry.