English

Viscosity in a Lepton-Photon Universe

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2016-10-18 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We look at viscosity production in a universe consisting purely of leptons and photons. This is quite close to what the Universe actually look like when the temperature was between 101010^{10} K and 101210^{12} K (11 -- 100100 MeV). By taking the strong force and the hadronic particles out of the equation, we can examine how the viscous forces behave with all the 12 leptons present. By this we study how shear- and (more interestingly) bulk viscosity is affected during periods with particle annihilation. We use the theory given by Hoogeveen et. al. from 1986, replicate their 9-particle results and expanded it to include the muon and tau particles as well. This will impact the bulk viscosity immensely for high temperatures. We will show that during the beginning of the lepton era, when the temperature is around 100 MeV, the bulk viscosity will be roughly 100 million times larger with muons included in the model compared to a model without.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1606.02481,
  title  = {Viscosity in a Lepton-Photon Universe},
  author = {Lars Husdal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.02481},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

14 pages, 10 figures + 2 tables in pdf format (= 12 figures)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T14:20:22.185Z