Quark-hadron phase transitions in the viscous early universe

Abstract

In the standard hot big bang theory, when the Universe was about 1-10μs old, the cosmological matter is conjectured to undergo quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase transition(s) from quark matter to hadrons. In the present work, we study the cosmological quark-hadron phase transition in two different physical scenarios. First, by assuming that the phase transition would be described by an effective nucleation theory (prompt first-order phase transition), we analyze the evolution of the relevant cosmological parameters of the early universe (energy density ρ, temperature T, Hubble parameter H, and the scale factor a) before, during, and after the phase transition. To study the cosmological dynamics and the time evolution, we use both analytical and numerical methods. The case where the Universe evolved through a mixed phase with a small initial supercooling and monotonically growing hadronic bubbles is also considered in detail. The numerical estimation of the cosmological parameters, a and H for instance, shows that the time evolution of the Universe varies from phase to phase. As the QCD era turns to be fairly accessible in the high-energy experiments and the lattice QCD simulations, the QCD equation of state is very well defined. In light of these QCD results, we develop a systematic study of the crossover quark-hadron phase transition, and an estimation for the time evolution of the Hubble parameter during the crossover. © 2012 American Physical Society.