The sounds of the Little and Big Bangs

Abstract

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 hydrodynamics, but even small perturbations on top of the explosion turned to be well described by hydrodynamical sound modes. The cosmological Big Bang also went through phase transitions, the QCD and electroweak ones, which are expected to produce sounds as well. We discuss their subsequent evolution and hypothetical inverse acoustic cascade, amplifying the amplitude. Ultimately, collision of two sound waves leads to formation of gravity waves, with the smallest wavelength. We briefly discuss how those can be detected.

This paper is a short semi-popular review describing some recent developments in two very different fields, united by some common physics. It was written for the Universe journal

References in corpus (9)

• Strongly coupled plasma with electric and magnetic charges
• Eccentricity fluctuations and elliptic flow at RHIC
• Resolving the HBT Puzzle in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collision
• Magnetic Component of Quark-Gluon Plasma is also a Liquid!
• Thermal Monopole Condensation and Confinement in finite temperature Yang-Mills Theories
• Electric and Magnetic Screening Masses at Finite Temperature from Generalized Polyakov-Line Correlations in Two-flavor Lattice QCD
• The role of monopoles in a Gluon Plasma
• Static $\bar{Q}Q$ pair free energy and screening masses from correlators of Polyakov loops: continuum extrapolated lattice results at the QCD physical point
• Gravity waves generated by sounds from big bang phase transitions