  We suggest that the "new form of matter" found just above $T_c$ by RHIC is
made up of tightly bound quark-antiquark pairs, essentially 32 chirally
restored (more precisely, nearly massless) mesons of the quantum numbers of
$\pi$, $\sigma$, $\rho$ and $a_1$. Taking the results of lattice gauge
simulations (LGS) for the color Coulomb potential from the work of the
Bielefeld group and feeding this into a relativistic two-body code, after
modifying the heavy-quark lattice results so as to include the
velocity-velocity interaction, all ground-state eigenvalues of the 32 mesons go
to zero at $T_c$ just as they do from below $T_c$ as predicted by the vector
manifestation (VM in short) of hidden local symmetry. This could explain the
rapid rise in entropy up to $T_c$ found in LGS calculations. We argue that how
the dynamics work can be understood from the behavior of the hard and soft
glue.
