PRIMORDIAL SOUP.

THE MYSTERY OF THE STRONG FORCE ONE OF THE BIGGEST open questions about quark-gluon plasma is when, exactly, the quarks and gluons break out of their confinement. A TECHNICIAN installs cables on the new sPHENIX detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Long Island's Brookhaven National Laboratory. In QCD, though, the force carrier, the gluon, also carries a color charge and can interact through the strong force with itself and with quarks. Quark Soup Particle accelerators give scientists a glimpse of the beginning of time by re-creating the "soup" of our newborn universe, called quark-gluon plasma. [Extracted from the article]