Related papers: The Cosmological QCD Phase Transition Revisited
The detection of a stochastic Gravitational Wave (GW) background sourced by a cosmological phase transition would allow us to see the early Universe from a completely new perspective, illuminating aspects of Beyond the Standard Model (BSM)…
The quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram, which reveals the state of strongly interacting matter at different temperatures and densities, is key to answering open questions in physics, ranging from the behavior of particles in neutron…
We investigate the properties of a cosmological scenario which undergoes a gravitational phase transition at late times. In this scenario, the Universe evolves according to general relativity in the standard, hot Big Bang picture until a…
Quintessential inflation provides a unified description of the early and late accelerated phases of the Universe, linking the inflationary epoch to the present-day dark energy-dominated era through a single scalar degree of freedom. In this…
We present an alternative scenario for cosmic structure formation where initial fluctuations are due to Kalb-Ramond axions produced during a pre-big bang phase of inflation. We investigate whether this scenario, where the fluctuations are…
The QCD axion in the pre-inflation scenario faces a stringent isocurvature constraint, which requires a relatively low Hubble scale during inflation. If the axion was heavier than the Hubble scale during inflation, its isocurvature is…
The QCD axion cosmology depends crucially on whether the QCD axion is present during inflation or not. We point out that contrary to the standard criterion, the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry could remain unbroken during inflation, even when…
We study the observable implications of an incomplete first order phase transition during inflation. In such a phase transition, the nucleated bubbles do not percolate and instead are continuously produced until the onset of reheating. The…
We study the production, spectrum and detectability of gravitational waves in models of the early Universe where first order phase transitions occur during inflation. We consider all relevant sources. The self-consistency of the scenario…
The analysis of the CMB anisotropies is a rich source of cosmological informations. In our study, we simulated the signals produced by the relics of a first order phase transition occured during an inflationary epoch in the early Universe.…
Inflation produces super-horizon sized perturbations that ultimately return within the horizon and are thought to form the seeds of all observed large scale structure in the Universe. But inflationary predictions can only be compared with…
It is well-known that first order phase transitions in the early universe can be a powerful source of observable stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds. Any such gravitational wave background must exhibit large-scale anisotropies at…
We review theoretical approaches to explore the phase diagram of nuclear and quark matter at high baryon density. We first look over the basic properties of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and address how to describe various states of QCD…
Baryon asymmetry of the universe (BAU) is naturally explained with $K^0-K^{0'}$ oscillations of a newly developed mirror-matter model and new understanding of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transitions. A consistent picture for the…
The cosmic first order phase transition from quarks to hadrons, occurring a few microseconds after the Big Bang, would lead to the formation of quark nuggets which would be stable on a cosmological time scale, if the associated baryon…
We investigate the joint effect of the cosmological phase transitions, thermal light dark matter, and the lepton asymmetry on the big bang nucleosynthesis and cosmic microwave background. We find that all of them can modify the predictions…
Within some approaches to loop quantum cosmology, the existence of an Euclidean phase at high density has been suggested. In this article, we try to explain clearly what are the observable consequences of this possible disappearance of…
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…
We consider that the pre-inflation era is radiation-dominated, transiting smoothly to the inflationary era. We work out in detail the dynamics of inflaton fluctuations across the phase transition and the proper choices of initial vacuum…
We investigate the transport of baryon number across phase boundaries in a putative first order QCD-phase transition. Two independent phenomenological models are employed to estimate the baryon penetrability at the phase boundary:…