Is the reason for the split believed to be spontaneous symmetry breaking? If so, did SSB occur because the Universe was cooling rapidly from extremely high temperatures?
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There is no fully worked out theory of how the strong and electroweak forces split, because there is no fully worked out unified theory to describe them. Various attempts have been made, e.g. Georgi and Glashow's SU(5) theory and Georgi (and others?) SO(10) theory, however none have proved fully satisfactory.
The idea that the electroweak and strong forces unify is an attractive one, and is supported by the convergence of the coupling constants if (and only if) supersymmetry intervenes in the right way. However grand unification remains unproven.
If the electroweak and strong forces do unify then it seems likely it would be broken by spontaneous symmetry breaking just as at the electroweak transition. This would happen when the average particle energies fell below around $10^{16}$ GeV.
John Rennie
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