Primordial plasmas and how to study them

Relativistic heavy ion collisions create a high temperature, dense and de-confined plasma of primordial matter (quarks and gluons). This Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP) is theorized to have existed a few micro-seconds after the big bang and thus, studying its spatio-temporal properties from its creation, evolution and eventual demise into hadronic bound matter is crucial to our understand of the early universe and interaction between fundamental particles. In this talk, I will go through an experimentalist's approach towards categorizing various properties of the QGP, and how we can measure them in experiments at both RHIC and LHC. We will end by looking forward to data from the upcoming runs at RHIC, the new sPHENIX detector and provide a long term outlook to discovery QCD physics at the EIC.