Topic summary
Free quark
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Quark.
Other phases of quark matter
The exact conditions needed to give rise to this state are unknown and have been the subject of a great deal of speculation and experimentation. An estimate puts the needed temperature at (1.90±0.02)×10kelvin. While a state of entirely free quarks and gluons has never been achieved (despite numerous attempts by CERN in the 1980s and 1990s), recent experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have yielded evidence for liquid-like quark matter exhibiting "nearly perfect" fluid motion.