Since gluon fields do not appear apart from quarks, did gluon fields first appear during the quark epoch?

Question

Big Bang cosmology and grand unification theories say that the strong force and the electroweak force separated during the electroweak epoch, i.e., $10^{-36}$ to $10^{-32}$ seconds after the Planck epoch. I also read some accounts that say the strong force fields and the electroweak fields separated during the same electroweak epoch. However, since gluon fields do not a appear apart from quarks, then I suppose gluon fields did not arise until the origin of quarks in the quark epoch, i.e., $10^{-12}$ to $10^{-6}$ seconds after the Planck epoch.

If this is the case, then I suppose the strong force separated from the electroweak force during the electroweak epoch; yet no strong force fields arose until the quark epoch. Has anybody proposed this model?

Answer 1

The quark epoch is not the time when quarks first emerged. It describes the period after electroweak unification when the temperature was still too high for the quarks to bind into hadrons i.e. the period during which they were present as a quark gluon plasma.

Assuming the grand unification ideas are on the right lines, quarks and gluons first became distinct particles after grand unification. The only change after the electroweak symmetry breaking is that the quarks acquired a mass, but the lighter quark masses are pretty small and wouldn't have made much difference.