Quark–Gluon Plasma —A Journey to the Extreme World of Primordial Matter

Dear Colleagues,

The early universe was extremely hot. The primordial state consisting of partons just produced from the Big Bang exist presumably as the ‘Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP)’, where the quarks and gluons are asymptotically free and not yet confined into hadrons. A few millionths of a second later, as the universe cooled, quarks aggregated to produce protons and neutrons, which all nuclei in our surroundings today consist of. 

The questions on the QCD phase structure including properties of the QGP and its hadronization are one of the hottest issues to understand the evolution of the matter under extreme conditions such as high temperature and density, from the Big Bang to the neutron star. The only way to realize such an extreme environment is relativistic heavy ion collisions, whereas elementary collisions such as proton–proton collisions provide a reference which can be quite well described by non-perturbative QCD theory. Since heavy ion collision experiments were for the first time in history carried out in AGS and SPS, systematic and multidimensional studies over a wide range of collision energy and systems are currently evolving, and at last, strongly interacting QGP is manifested in RHIC and LHC. QGP-research covers investigations on strongly coupled partonic and hadronic medium and the search for 1st order phase transition and the critical point, where the 1st order phase transition joins the higher order cross-over region. The former part is now experimentally ongoing at LHC, looking forward to having rich results soon to be measured by the upgraded detector performance with the higher luminosity of heavy ion beam, while the latter is being studied via the beam-energy-scan experimental program at RHIC while waiting for dedicated experiments on the compressed baryonic matter at high-luminosity heavy ion beam at the low energy in FAIR and NICA to explore low temperature and finite baryon density.

This Special Issue on QGP aims to deliver a summary of what we have learned so far and prospective insights on progress in the coming decades.

Prof. Dr. In-Kwon Yoo
Guest Editor

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• strongly-interacting quark matter
• quark-gluon plasma
• matter under extreme conditions
• perfect fluid
• compressed baryonic matter
• quark confinement into hadrons