Related papers: "Invisible" QCD axion rolling through the QCD phas…
The Universe may contain sufficiently small size matter-antimatter domains at temperatures of a few hundred MeV, without violating the success of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. We demonstrate that this possibility enhances the keV scale sterile…
The physics of the 20th Century is governed by two pillars, Einstein's relativity principle and the quantum principle. At the beginning of the 21st Century, it becomes clear that there exist the smallest units of matter, such as electrons,…
A qualitative analysis of the chiral phase transition in QCD with two massless quarks and non-zero baryon density is performed. It is assumed that at zero baryonic density, $\rho=0$, the temperature phase transition is of the second order…
We discuss production of QCD axion dark matter in a novel scenario, which assumes time-varying scale of Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking. The latter decreases as the Universe's temperature at early times and eventually stabilises at a large…
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…
Thermal axion production in the early universe goes through several mass thresholds, and the resulting rate may change dramatically across them. Focusing on the KSVZ and DFSZ frameworks for the invisible QCD axion, we perform a systematic…
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…
For large baryochemical potential, strongly interacting matter might undergo a first order phase transition at temperatures T ~ 100-200 MeV. Within standard cosmology, however, the chemical potential is assumed to be very small leading to a…
We investigate a new mechanism for the cosmological QCD phase transition: inhomogeneous nucleation. The primordial temperature fluctuations, measured to be $\delta T/T \sim 10^{-5}$, are larger than the tiny temperature interval, in which…
We determine the nature of the QCD transition using lattice calculations for physical quark masses. Susceptibilities are extrapolated to vanishing lattice spacing for three physical volumes, the smallest and largest of which differ by a…
The scenario that some first-order phase transitions may have taken place in the early Universe offers us one of the most intriguing and fascinating questions in cosmology. Indeed, the role played by the latent "heat" or energy released in…
Strongly interacting matter as described by the thermodynamics of QCD undergoes a phase transition, from a low temperature hadronic medium to a high temperature quark-gluon plasma state. In the early universe this transition occurred during…
We analyze multiparticle production in a thermal framework for 7 central nucleus nucleus collisions, $e^+$+ $e^-$ annihilation into hadrons on the Z resonance and 4 hadronic reactions (p+p and p+$\bar{p}$ with partial centrality selec…
I retrace the developments from Hagedorn's concept of a limiting temperature for hadronic matter to the discovery and characterization of the quark-gluon plasma as a new state of matter. My recollections begin with the transformation more…
The QCD axion bubbles can form due to an explicit breaking of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry in the early Universe. In this paper, we investigate the modified formation of QCD axion bubble in the presence of axionlike particle (ALP), considering…
The phase diagram of QCD at finite temperature and density is discussed. Large numbers of quark colors, $N_{\rm c} >> 1$, is used to explain generic features of the phase diagram. For temperatures below $ T \le 160$~MeV at zero baryon…
In this paper we provide a physical picture for the QCD phase transition in terms of qualitative changes in the spectral functions. Our approach takes into account the crossover nature of this transition and counts for the observed strong…
A qualitative analysis of the chiral phase transition in QCD at non--zero baryon density is performed. It is assumed that at zero baryonic density, $\rho=0$, the temperature phase transition is of the second order and quark condesate $\eta=…
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…
We study the scaling properties of the finite temperature QCD phase transition, for light quark masses ranging from the heavy quark regime to their physical values. The lattice results are obtained in the fixed scale approach from…