Related papers: "Invisible" QCD axion rolling through the QCD phas…
It is entirely plausible that during the primordial quark-hadron transition, microseconds after the Big Bang, the universe may experience supercooling accompanied by mini inflation leading to a first-order phase transition from quarks to…
We recently obtained an estimate of the axion mass based on the hypothesis that axions make up most of the dark matter in the universe. A key ingredient for this calculation was the temperature-dependence of the topological susceptibility…
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…
Quantum chromodynamics predicts that the interaction between its fundamental constituents, quarks and gluons, can lead to different states of strongly interacting matter, dependent on its temperature and baryon density. We first survey the…
Using a unified hadron-quark effective model for the QCD equation of state, this paper studies the phase structure of strongly interacting matter in a wide range of temperature and baryonchemical potential. At small potentials the model…
The past fifty years have seen the emergence of a new field of research in physics, the study of matter at extreme temperatures and densities. The theory of strong interactions, quantum chromodynamics (QCD), predicts that in this limit,…
Once upon a time, the world was simple: the proton contained three quarks, two {\it ups} and a {\it down}. How these give the proton its mass and its spin seemed obvious. Over the past forty years the proton has become more complicated, and…
Properties of high-density strong-interaction matter of relevance for astrophysical scenarios that involve neutron stars are discussed. It is argued that theoretical and experimental insights from the small baryo-chemical potential…
We argue that hadron multiplicities in central high energy nucleus-nucleus collisions are established very close to the phase boundary between hadronic and quark matter. In the hadronic picture this can be described by multi-particle…
The visible Universe is largely characterised by a single mass-scale; namely, the proton mass, $m_p$. Contemporary theory suggests that $m_p$ emerges as a consequence of gluon self-interactions, which are a defining characteristic of…
We extend our previous study [Phys. Lett. B643 (2006) 46] of the cross-over temperatures (T_c) of QCD. We improve our zero temperature analysis by using physical quark masses and finer lattices. In addition to the kaon decay constant used…
The thermodynamic behavior of QCD matter at high temperature is currently studied by lattice QCD theory. The main features are the fast rise of the energy density $\epsilon$ around the critical temperature $T_c$ and the large trace anomaly…
The quark-hadron transition that happens in ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions is expected to be influenced by the effects of rotation and magnetic field, both present due to the geometry of a generic non-head-on impact. We augment the…
I discuss the phase structure of strongly interacting matter at high temperatures and densities, as predicted by statistical QCD, and consider in particular the nature of the transition of hot hadronic matter to a plasma of deconfined…
It is entirely plausible under reasonable condition, that a first order QCD phase transition occurred from quarks to hadrons when the universe was about a microsecond old. Relics, if there be any, after the quark hadron phase transition are…
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…
We propose a scheme to determine the chemical potential and baryon number density of the hadron-quark phase transition in cold dense strong interaction matter (compact star matter). The hadron matter is described with the relativistic mean…
We revisit the phase structure and thermodynamics of QCD in the low temperature and high density region, where a strong, first-order phase transition is expected beyond the critical end point. By solving the quark gap equation in the…
The chiral phase transition temperature $T_{c}^{0}$ is a fundamental quantity of QCD. To determine this quantity we have performed simulations of (2 + 1)-flavor QCD using the Highly Improved Staggered Quarks (HISQ/tree) action on…
Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), the theory of strong interactions, in principle describes the interaction of quark and gluon fields. However, due to the self-coupling of the gluons, quarks and gluons are confined into hadrons and cannot exist…