Related papers: The hot Hagedorn Universe
Ultrarelativistic heavy ion collisions at the laboratory provide a unique chance to study quantum chromodynamics (QCD) under extreme temperature (${\approx}150\,\mathrm{MeV}$) and density (${\approx}1\,\mathrm{GeV}/\mathrm{fm}^3$)…
We consider the early universe at temperatures close to the fundamental scale of gravity (M_D << M_Planck) in models with extra dimensions. At such temperatures a small fraction of particles will experience transplanckian collisions that…
The ten's of micro-Kelvin variations in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation across the sky encode a wealth of information about the Universe. The full-sky, high-resolution maps of the CMB that will be made in…
For two decades the hot big-bang model has been referred to as the standard cosmology -- and for good reason. For just as long cosmologists have known that there are fundamental questions that are not addressed by the standard cosmology and…
We bring up the fact that the bulk thermal properties of the hadron gas, as measured on the lattice, preclude a very fast rising of the number of resonance states in the QCD spectrum, as assumed by the Hagedorn hypothesis, unless a…
Quantum Chromo Dynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, predicts a transition of the usual matter to a new phase of matter, called Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP), at sufficiently high temperatures. The non-perturbative technique of…
The Pierre Auger Collaboration has reported an excess in the number of muons of a few tens of percent over expectations computed using extrapolation of hadronic interaction models tuned to accommodate LHC data. Very recently, we proposed an…
We describe how cosmology has converged towards a beautiful model of the Universe: the Big Bang Universe. We praise this model, but show there is a dark side to it. This dark side is usually called ``the cosmological problems'': a set of…
The quark gluon plasma (QGP) is one of the most interesting forms of matter providing us with insight on quantum chromodynamics (QCD) and the early universe. It is believed that the heavy-ion collision experiments at the Relativistic Heavy…
We first introduce the conceptual basis of critical behaviour in strongly interacting matter, with colour deconfinement as QCD analog of the insulator-conductor transition and chiral symmetry restoration as special case of the associated…
The last phase transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics took place at the QCD scale $T\sim200$ MeV when the universe was about $t\sim10^{-5}$ seconds old and the Hubble radius was around 10 Km. In this paper, we…
The physical ingredients to describe the epoch of cosmological recombination are amazingly simple and well-understood. This fact allows us to take into account a very large variety of processes, still finding potentially measurable…
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…
In this study we have investigated a particular state-of-the-art model which is currently used to refine our knowledge of the workings of the strong interaction and the way that it is manifested in both neutron stars and heavy nuclei,…
The chromo-magnetic monopoles (CMM), emergent topological excitations of non-Abelian gauge fields carrying chromo-magnetic charge, have long been postulated to play an important role in the vacuum confinement of quantum chromodynamics…
This is an introduction to the study of strongly interacting matter. We survey its different possible states and discuss the transition from hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined quarks and gluons. Following this, we summarize the…
High energy heavy-ion collisions in laboratory produce a form of matter that can test Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, at high temperatures. One of the exciting possibilities is the existence of…
The temperature anisotropies and polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation provide a window back to the physics of the early universe. They encode the nature of the initial fluctuations and so can reveal much about the…
A strongly coupled quark-gluon plasma (QGP) of heavy constituent quasi-particles is studied by a path-integral Monte-Carlo method. This approach is a quantum generalization of the model developed by Gelman, Shuryak and Zahed. It is shown…
This review describes the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 and its impact on cosmology in the 50 years that followed. This discovery has established the Big Bang model of the Universe and the analysis of its…