Related papers: Cosmic Phase Transitions
The study of cosmic phase transitions are of central interest in modern cosmology. In the standard model of cosmology the Universe begins in a very hot state, right after at the end of inflation via the process of reheating/preheating, and…
The cosmological QCD phase transition is studied in terms of the color confinement at finite temperature using the dual Higgs theory of QCD. The confinement force is largely reduced at high temperature, which leads to the swelling of…
The evolution of the Universe is the ultimate laboratory to study fundamental physics across energy scales that span about 25 orders of magnitude: from the grand unification scale through particle and nuclear physics scales down to the…
We study first order phase transitions that occur when the temperature of the system increases and we identify the conditions that lead to super-heating, a phase where the system can heat up arbitrarily. First order phase transitions with…
The QCD phase diagram might exhibit a first order phase transition for large baryochemical potentials. We explore the cosmological implications of such a QCD phase transition in the early universe. We propose that the large baryon-asymmetry…
We discuss recent progress (and controversies) in the theory of finite temperature phase transitions. This includes the structure of the effective potential at a finite temperature, the infrared problem in quantum statistics of gauge…
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…
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 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…
Cosmological phase transitions are thought to have taken place at the early Universe imprinting their properties on the observable Universe. There is strong evidence that, through the dynamics of a scalar field that lead a second order…
In these lectures I discuss cosmological phase transitions with the goal of establishing the possibility of observational consequences. I argue that the {\em only} phase transition amenable of experimental study within the foreseeable…
We review briefly the current status of thermal phase transitions within the Standard Model and its simplest extensions. We start with an update on QCD thermodynamics, then discuss the electroweak phase transition, particularly in…
The QCD phase transition at finite temperature is studied with the dual Ginzburg-Landau theory, which is the QCD effective theory based on the dual Higgs mechanism by QCD-monopole condensation. At high temperature, the confinement force is…
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…
In recent years, quantum phase transitions have attracted the interest of both theorists and experimentalists in condensed matter physics. These transitions, which are accessed at zero temperature by variation of a non-thermal control…
In a quantum theory of cosmology spacetime behaves classically only in limited patches of the configuration space on which the wave function of the universe is defined. Quantum transitions can connect classical evolution in different…
Physical processes related to cosmological first-order phase transitions are discussed and reviewed in this introductory part of dissertation. I first describe cosmological phase transitions on a general level, concentrating on bubble…
The QCD phase transition has important consequences in the context of both the early universe as well as compact stars. Such transitions are being studied for high temperature and small chemical potential scenario in the laboratory. There…
Topological defects are thought to be left behind by the cosmological phase transitions which occur as the universe expands and cools. Similar processes can be studied in the phase transitions which take place in the laboratory:…
The three phase transitions - the GUT, the electro-weak and the quark-hadron, which the universe is assumed to have undergone produce very important physical effects if they are assumed to be of first order. It is also important that enough…