QCD as a theory of extended, strongly interacting matter is familiar from big bang evolution which, within the time interval from electro-weak decoupling (10−12 s) to hadron formation (5 × 10−6 s), is dominated by the expansion of quark–gluon matter, a color conducting plasma that is deconfined. In the 1970s deconfinement was predicted [1–5] to arise from the newly discovered “asymptotic freedom” property of QCD; i.e., the plasma was expected to be a solution of perturbative QCD at asymptotically high square momentum transfer Q 2, or temperature T