Related papers: Quarks in the universe
I first review the early history of the ultrarelativistic heavy ion program, starting with the 1974 Bear Mountain Workshop, and the 1983 Aurora meeting of the U.S. Nuclear Science Committee, just one billion seconds ago, which laid out the…
When the universe was about 10 $\mu $seconds old, a first order cosmological quark - hadron phase transition occurred at a critical temperature of around 200 MeV. In this work, we study the quark-hadron phase transition in the context of…
Understanding where elements were formed has been a key goal in astrophysics for nearly a century, with answers involving cosmology, stellar burning, and cosmic explosions. Since 1957, the origin of the heaviest elements (formed via the…
QCD predicts that strongly interacting matter will undergo a transition from a state of hadronic constituents to a plasma of unbound quarks and gluons. We first survey the conceptual features of this transition and its description in finite…
The effect of the QCD phase transition is studied for the mass-radius relation of compact stars and for hot and dense matter at a given proton fraction used as input in core-collapse supernova simulations. The phase transitions to the 2SC…
Blue-supergiant stars develop into core-collapse supernovae --- one of the most energetic outbursts in the universe --- when all nuclear burning fuel is exhausted in the stellar core. Previous attempts failed to explain observed explosions…
In this thesis the finite temperature transition between confined and deconfined matter is studied at zero and nonzero quark densities. The findings are relevant for the understanding of the evolution of the early Universe and contemporary…
We find that QCD can create the cosmological matter abundance via out-of-equilibrium processes during the QCD phase transition, that is what we call the QCD preheating, where the dynamic transition of the QCD vacuum characterized by the…
The vacuum is filled with complex scalar fields, such as the Higgs field. These fields serve as order parameters for superfluidity (quantum phase coherence over macroscopic distances), making the entire universe a superfluid. We review a…
At the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) collisions of heavy ions at nucleon-nucleon energies of 200 GeV appear to have created a new form of matter thought to be a deconfined state of the partons that ordinarily are bound in…
In this paper, analogies between multiparticle production in high-energy collisions and the time evolution of the early universe are discussed. A common explanation is put forward under the assumption of an unconventional early state: a…
We study the dynamics of the quark-hadron transition for a scenario in which the Universe is matter dominated and a large amount of entropy is generated by decaying particles of mass 1--10 TeV, as suggested by a large class of…
According to extensive ab initio calculations of lattice QCD, the very large energy density available in heavy-ion collisions at SPS and now at RHIC must be sufficient to generate quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a new state of matter in the form…
The early stage of a heavy-ion collision is marked by rapid entropy production and the transition from a gluon saturated initial condition to a plasma of quarks and gluons that evolves hydrodynamically. However, during the early times of…
Recent studies based on non-perturbative lattice Monte-Carlo solutions of Quantum Chromodynamics, the theory of strong interactions, demonstrated that at high temperature there is a phase change from confined hadronic matter to a deconfined…
Preliminary charge balance functions from the STAR Collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) are compared to a model where quarks are produced in two waves. If a chemically equilibrated quark-gluon plasma (QGP) is created…
A classical dynamical system in a four-dimensional Euclidean space with universal time is considered. The space is hypothesized to be originally occupied by a uniform substance, pictured as a liquid, which at some time became supercooled.…
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the generally accepted theory for the strong interactions, describes the interactions between quarks and gluons. The strongly interacting particles that are seen in nature are hadrons, which are composites of…
The hot and dense QCD matter produced in nuclear collisions at ultrarelativistic energy is characterized by very intense electromagnetic fields which attain their maximal strength in the early pre-equilibrium stage and interplay with the…
Heavy quarks are produced at the first instant of a nucleus--nucleus collision and therefore are an important tool to study the subsequent high energy-density medium formed in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. A series of…