Related papers: What happened to the Cosmological QCD Phase Transi…
The QCD phase transition has important consequences in the context of both the early universe as well as compact stars. Such transitions are being studied for high temperature and small chemical potential scenario in the laboratory. There…
A standard picture in cosmology has been emerging over the past decade in which a phase transition, associated with chiral symmetry breaking after the electroweak transition, has occurred at approximately $10^{-6}$ seconds after the Big…
In this lecture at a school for condensed matter physicists, I begin with basic concepts and tools for investigating phase transitions in quantum field theory. The very different roles of global and gauge symmetries in phase transitions…
Vacuum energy changes during cosmological phase transitions and becomes relatively important at epochs just before phase transitions. For a viable cosmology the vacuum energy just after a phase transition must be set by the critical…
At very large densities and/or temperatures a quark-hadron phase transition is expected to take place. Simulations of QCD on lattice at zero baryon density indicate that the transition occurs at $T_c \sim 150-170$ MeV. The calculations…
A crossover QCD phase transition in the early Universe, involving a formation scenario of stable strangeon nuggets is studied. The Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model is applied to calculate the thermodynamics of the QCD phase with u, d, s…
We consider first-order phase transitions of the Universe in the radiation-dominated era. We argue that in general the velocity of interfaces is non-relativistic due to the interaction with the plasma and the release of latent heat. We…
In this work, the quark-hadron phase transition in a chameleon Brans-Dicke model of brane world cosmology within an effective model of QCD is investigated. Whereas, in the chameleon Brans-Dicke model of brane world cosmology, the Friedmann…
In the early Universe, strongly interacting matter was a quark-gluon plasma. Both lattice computations and heavy ion collision experiments however tell us that, in the absence of chemical potentials, no plasma survives at $T <\sim 150$ MeV.…
We explore a scenario that allows for a strong first order phase-transition of QCD at non-negligible baryon number in the early universe and its possible cosmological observable consequences. The main assumption is a quasi-stable QCD-vacuum…
Physical processes related to cosmological first-order phase transitions are discussed and reviewed in this introductory part of dissertation. I first describe cosmological phase transitions on a general level, concentrating on bubble…
We calculate the size distribution of quark nuggets, which could be formed due to first order QCD phase transition in the early universe. We find that there are a large number of stable Quark Nuggets which could be a viable candidate for…
We consider thermal QCD in the large N_C limit, mainly in 1+1 dimensions. The gauge coupling is only taken into account to minimal order, by projection onto colour singlets. An expression for the free energy, exact as N_C goes to infinity,…
A quark-gluon phase transition in the Universe is researched after which vacuum (dark) energy has hardened and become cosmological constant. Before this a vacuum component of the Universe was changing by jumps during phase transitions since…
We investigate the process of phase conversion in a thermally-driven {\it weakly} first-order quark-hadron transition. This scenario is physically appealing even if the nature of this transition in equilibrium proves to be a smooth…
In the standard picture of cosmology it is predicted that a phase transition, associated with chiral symmetry breaking after the electroweak transition, has occurred at approximately 10 \mu seconds after the Big Bang to convert a plasma of…
We explore the possibility that QCD may undergo a phase transition as a function of the strange quark mass. This would hint towards models with ``spontaneous color symmetry breaking'' in the vacuum. For two light quark flavors we classify…
The strong interaction - governed by Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) - shapes the structure of the visible universe. At about 10 $\mu$s after the big bang, the primordial matter made up of quarks and gluons plus leptons, photons and neutrinos,…
We examine the first-order cosmological QCD phase transition for a large class of parameter values, previously considered unlikely. We find that the hadron bubbles can nucleate at very large distance scales, they can grow as detonations as…
The QCD phase transition at finite temperature is studied with the dual Ginzburg-Landau theory, which is the QCD effective theory based on the dual Higgs mechanism by QCD-monopole condensation. At high temperature, the confinement force is…