It’s often said that in its earliest moments the universe was in a hot, dense state. While that’s a reasonably accurate description, it’s also quite vague. What exactly was it that was hot and dense, and what state was it in? Answering that question takes both complex theoretical modeling and high-energy experiments in particle physics. But as a recent study shows, we are learning quite a bit.
According to particle physics and the standard cosmological model, matter appeared within the first microsecond of the universe. This initial matter is thought to be a dense soup of
quarks interacting in a sea of gluons. This state of matter is known as a Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP). The behavior of QGP is governed by the strong force, following the laws of quantum chromodynamics (QCD). While we understand QCD relatively well, the mathematics of the theory is so complex it is difficult to calculate. Even with supercomputers, it’s hard to compute the state of dense quark-gluon interactions.
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