Tuesday, February 6, 2024

How Hot Is Quark Gluon Plasma?

Quarks and gluons are normally "confined", i.e. they can be observed only within hadrons and not "free" of a composite particle (except for top quarks with decay via the weak force before they have time to hadronize). But if you add enough energy, hadrons fall apart and their quarks and gluons from a quark gluon plasma (QGP).

At temperature does this happen? 

A recent measurement says (3.40 ± 0.55) × 1012 degrees Kelvin.

This is about 150 MeV in electron-volt units, and corresponds to 10-12 seconds after the Big Bang in the standard chronology of the universe.

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