Early Cosmological Period of QCD Confinement

Abstract

If the strong coupling is promoted to a dynamical field-dependent quantity, it is possible that the strong force looked very different in the early Universe. We consider a scenario in which the dynamics is such that QCD confines at high temperatures with a large dynamical scale, relaxing back to ~1 GeV before big bang nucleosynthesis. We discuss the cosmological implications and explore potential applications, including fleshing out a new mechanism for baryogenesis which opens up if QCD confines before the electroweak phase transition of the Standard Model.

v2: Matches the published version

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Cited by in corpus (26)

• The landscape of QCD axion models
• Theoretical uncertainties for cosmological first-order phase transitions
• Axiogenesis
• String Fragmentation in Supercooled Confinement and Implications for Dark Matter
• Axion Misalignment Driven to the Hilltop
• Supercool exit: Gravitational waves from QCD-triggered conformal symmetry breaking
• Dynamical Axions and Gravitational Waves
• Electroweak Baryogenesis from Temperature-Varying Couplings
• Axion Misalignment Driven to the Bottom
• QCD Baryogenesis
• Cosmologically Varying Kinetic Mixing
• Avoided Deconfinement in Randall-Sundrum Models
• LIGO/Virgo Black Holes from a First Order QCD Phase Transition
• Signatures of a High Temperature QCD Transition in the Early Universe
• Resurrecting Low-Mass Axion Dark Matter Via a Dynamical QCD Scale
• Dark Matter Freeze Out during an Early Cosmological Period of QCD Confinement
• A phase of confined electroweak force in the early Universe
• Distinctive signals of frustrated dark matter
• Singlet fermion dark matter and Dirac neutrinos from Peccei-Quinn symmetry
• Varying gauge couplings and collider phenomenology
• QCD preheating: New frontier of baryogenesis
• A scalar potential from gauge condensation and its implications
• Common Origin of Warm Dark Matter and Dark Radiation
• Cosmological Stasis from Field-Dependent Decay
• Leptogenesis During an Era of Early SU(2) Confinement
• Cosmology from Strong Interactions