When the matter is heated up to about two trillion degrees Kelvin,quarks and gluons,that are ordinarily confined inside nucleons and other hadrons,will be deconfined and form a novel state of matter,called quark-gluon plasma.It is believed that shortly after the Big Bang,the early universe was filled with hot and dense quark-gluon plasma.The primary goal of high-energy heavy-ion collisions,such as those performed at the Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider(RHIC)and the Large Hadron Collider(LHC),is to create quark-gluon plasma in the laboratory,to study its novel properties and to explore the phase...
