Resonances Do Not Equilibrate

We study the quark confining vacuum structure, with the objective to liberate quarks and gluons at high temperature. The present day experimental effort involves colliding heavy nuclei and this limits the domain of deconfinement to the size of the atomic nucleus. The ‘free’ quarks and gluons form a thermal gas comprising color charges, the quark–gluon plasma — a hot soup of elementary matter, last seen in the Universe when matter was formed at about 30 μs after the big-bang. The temperature at which we deconfine the quark content of nucleons is Tc ≃ 160 MeV. However, we reach in heavy ion collisions, TMax ≃ 2–5Tc. At this relatively high temperature, we create strange quark and antiquark pairs in an abundance which rivals that of light quarks [1]. While this is going on, the compressed quark matter expands, the expansion consumes the thermal pressure and energy, and ultimately the fireball of hot quarks