Related papers: From Little Bangs to the Big Bang
Our universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot and dense singular point, in a process known as the Big Bang. The hot and dense matter which dominated the system within a few microseconds of its birth was in the…
The Hot Big Bang is often considered as the origin of all matter and radiation in the Universe. Primordial nucleosynthesis (BBN) provides strong evidence that the early Universe contained a hot plasma of photons and baryons with a…
Matter in its present form was formed when our Universe emerged from the quark-gluon phase (QGP) at about 30mus into its evolution. To explore this early period in the laboratory, we study highly excited matter formed in relativistic heavy…
In nuclear collisions at relativistic energies, matter is created which resembles closely the matter that filled all space until about 15 microseconds after the big bang. Here we summarize selected aspects of the research that led to the…
Big-Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) represents one of the earliest phenomena that can lead to observational constraints on the early Universe properties. It is well-known that many important mechanisms and phase transitions occurred before BBN.…
Motivated by inflation, the theory of big-bang nucleosynthesis and the quest for a deeper understanding of the fundamental forces and particles, a very successful paradigm for the development of structure in the Universe has evolved. It…
We present a new scenario for the development of the Universe after the Big Bang, built on the conjecture that a vast majority of the primordial quark matter did not undergo a phase transition to normal nuclear matter, but rather split up…
In the Big Bang scenario, the early Universe is characterized by the {\it particle era}, i.e. a Universe made of particles. This period connects both scales of fundamental physics: infinitesimally small and infinitely large. So, particle…
An introductory account is given of the understanding of the structure of the universe. At present the most plausible theory of the origin of the universe is that it formed from the explosion of an extremely hot and dense fireball several…
Studies of heavy ion collisions have discovered that tiny fireballs of new phase of matter -- quark gluon plasma (QGP) -- undergoes explosion, called the Little Bang. In spite of its small size, it is not only well described by…
The origins of matter and radiation in the universe lie in a Hot Big Bang. We present a number of well-motivated cosmologies in which the Big Bang occurs through a strong first order phase transition -- either at the end of inflation, after…
At high temperatures and densities the nuclear matter undergoes a phase transition to a new state of matter called quark gluon plasma (QGP). This new state of matter which existed in the universe after a few microsecond of the big bang can…
The observational evidence points to the origin of our Universe from a big-bang explosion, the normal matter we observed can be well explained by the particles created in the strong and weak interacting phases of the early universe. The…
Observations made using large ground-based and space-borne telescopes have probed cosmic history all the way from the present-day to a time when the Universe was less than a tenth of its present age. Earlier on lies the remaining frontier,…
In currently popular cosmological scenarios -- all variants of the cold dark matter (CDM) cosmogony -- some time beyond a redshift of 15, stars within the numerous small halos that condense with virial temperatures ~1e4 K created the first…
A better understanding of the formation of large-scale structure in the Universe is arguably the most pressing question in cosmology. The most compelling and promising theoretical paradigm, Inflation + Cold Dark Matter, holds that the…
We offer a survey of the matter-antimatter evolution within the primordial Universe. While the origin of the tiny matter-antimatter asymmetry has remained one of the big questions in modern cosmology, antimatter itself has played a large…
A scenario is presented where large quark-gluon plasma (QGP) objects escaping the quark-hadron transition in the early Universe account for the baryonic dark matter as well as act as the sources for gamma-ray bursts. Two basic assumptions…
One of the greatest mysteries in astrophysics and cosmology is the nature and the origin of cold dark matter, which represents more than 84% of the mass in the universe. Dark matter reacts on and produces gravitational forces and governs…
High energy collisions of particles may have created tiny black holes in the early Universe, which might leave stable remnants instead of fully evaporating as a result of Hawking radiation. If the reheating temperature was sufficiently…