In search of the quark-gluon plasma

This article describes in a very pedagogical manner the ultimate state of matter when quarks are no longer confined in hadrons. This state is called quark and gluon plasma, its existence is suspected through 4 facts: 1) a quark and gluon plasma that has just been created from a high energy ion-collision is mainly made up of light quarks (up and down), then this plasma should evolve towards other quarks (particularly strange quarks) because of the Pauli exclusion principle. This fact has been experimentally confirmed: at the CERN accelerator physicists have detected a higher production of strange hadrons when the energy of the collision increases; 2) some particles like ρ0 mesons, that are made up of 2 quarks, are massively produced in ion collisions, their mass has been measured at the moment of the collision and later in the quark and gluon plasma, 2 different values have been found so it confirms the theory that predicts that free quarks have a mass that decreases as energy increases; 3) J/Ψ mesons are made up of a charmed quark combined with its anti-quark, physicists have noticed that less J/Ψ mesons are detected when the energy of the collision rises, this result agrees with the fact that in quark gluon plasma where quarks are free and of different colours and flavors, it is highly unlikely that a charmed quark combines with its anti-quark to form a J/Ψ meson; and 4) the theory of the formation of quark gluon plasma predicts that its electromagnetic radiation has a thermal radiation specificity, physicists have studied the radiation spectra emitted in the core of a ion collision, they have shown that it is a thermal radiation and that the temperature of the emitter corresponds to the temperature of a quark gluon plasma. (A.C.)