These clusters decay into hadrons. Here, the prehadronic clusters are colored red and their size is proportional to their mass. After the gold nuclei have separated by 3 fermis, quark-gluon scattering has stopped. Now the prehadronic clusters are beginning to scatter off each other. The prehadronic clusters continue to scatter.
Some clusters decay into hadrons.
In the animation these hadrons are colored blue for pions, yellow for kaons, and cyan for protons and neutrons. All other excited hadrons are shown as magenta. The fast moving prehadronic clusters, which are becoming confined to regions moving to the right and left, continue to scatter off each other. The slower clusters have decayed into hadrons in the middle region. This delay of the decay for the fast moving clusters is due to a relativistic time dilation.