The Quark-Gluon Plasma

Abstract

With the advent of the basic theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), has come the conviction that nucleons - and more generally, all strongly interacting elementary particles (hadrons) - are bound states of quarks. Quarks are point-like and confined to “their” hadron by a binding potential V _o(r) which increases linearly with quark separation r,

$${V_0}(r) \sim \sigma r,$$

(1)

where the string tension δ measures the energy per unit separation distance. Hence an infinite amount of energy would be needed to isolate a quark; it cannot exist by itself, and it is therefore not possible to split an isolated hadron into its quark constituents.