The first second of the Universe

Abstract

The history of the Universe after its first second is now tested by high quality observations of light element abundances and temperature anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. The epoch of the first second itself has not been tested directly yet; however, it is constrained by experiments at particle and heavy ion accelerators. Here I attempt to describe the epoch between the electroweak transition and the primordial nucleosynthesis. The most dramatic event in that era is the quark--hadron transition at 10 $\mu$s. Quarks and gluons condense to form a gas of nucleons and light mesons, the latter decay subsequently. At the end of the first second, neutrinos and neutrons decouple from the radiation fluid. The quark--hadron transition and dissipative processes during the first second prepare the initial conditions for the synthesis of the first nuclei. As for the cold dark matter (CDM), WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) -- the most popular candidates for the CDM -- decouple from the presently known forms of matter, chemically (freeze-out) at 10 ns and kinetically at 1 ms. The chemical decoupling fixes their present abundances and dissipative processes during and after thermal decoupling set the scale for the very first WIMP clouds.

review to appear in Annalen der Physik (51 pages, 16 figures); references added (v2); typos corrected, resembles published version (v3)

References in corpus (8)

• First Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Determination of Cosmological Parameters
• The Emergent Universe: inflationary cosmology with no singularity
• The pressure of hot QCD up to g^6 ln(1/g)
• Primordial Nucleosynthesis in Light of WMAP
• Small-scale clumps in the galactic halo and dark matter annihilation
• Estimates of Cosmological Parameters Using the CMB Angular Power Spectrum of ACBAR
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Cited by in corpus (73)

• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Centrality determination of Pb-Pb collisions at $\sqrt{s_{\mathrm{NN}}}$ = 2.76 TeV with ALICE
• Improved Calculation of the Primordial Gravitational Wave Spectrum in the Standard Model
• Damping of Tensor Modes in Cosmology
• Phase diagram of hot QCD in an external magnetic field: possible splitting of deconfinement and chiral transitions
• Results from the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
• Chiral transition in a strong magnetic background
• Advances in perturbative thermal field theory
• Resummation in Hot Field Theories
• Phase transitions in the early and the present Universe
• Lepton asymmetry and the cosmic QCD transition
• Relic gravitational waves and their detection
• Destruction of small-scale dark matter clumps in the hierarchical structures and galaxies
• Introducing the Dirac-Milne universe
• NANOGrav signal from MHD turbulence at QCD phase transition in the early universe
• Small-scale clumps of dark matter
• QCD thermodynamics with continuum extrapolated Wilson fermions I
• Primordial fluctuations and cosmological inflation after WMAP 1.0
• On the relevance of matter and glue dynamics for baryon number fluctuations
• Can we observe the QCD phase transition-generated gravitational waves through pulsar timing arrays?
• The resilience of the Etherington-Hubble relation
• Can a strong magnetic background modify the nature of the chiral transition in QCD?
• Charmonium spectral functions from 2+1 flavour lattice QCD
• Quark-Gluon Matter
• Diffusion and local deconfinement in relativistic systems
• Cosmic QCD Epoch at Nonvanishing Lepton Asymmetry
• The effect of early dark matter halos on reionization
• Freezing-in a hot bath: resonances, medium effects and phase transitions
• Phase conversion in a weakly first-order quark-hadron transition
• The Cosmological QCD Phase Transition Revisited
• Evolution of primordial magnetic fields during large-scale structure formation
• Corrections to the black body radiation due to minimum-length deformed quantum mechanics
• Nonparametric Inference for the Cosmic Microwave Background
• Cosmology meets functional QCD: First-order cosmic QCD transition induced by large lepton asymmetries
• Modifications by QCD transition and $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation on analytic spectrum of relic gravitational waves in accelerating universe
• New thresholds for Primordial Black Hole formation during the QCD phase transition
• Cool quark matter with perturbative quark masses
• Crossover from a continuum study of chiral susceptibility
• Scaling Law and Universal Drop Size Distribution of Coarsening in Conversion-Limited Phase Separation
• Effects of the QCD Equation of State and Lepton Asymmetry on Primordial Gravitational Waves
• Improved calculation of relic gravitational waves
• Lepton asymmetry in the primordial gravitational wave spectrum
• WIMP abundance and lepton (flavour) asymmetry
• Cosmological forecasts on thermal axions, relic neutrinos and light elements
• Supersonic friction of a black hole traversing a self-interacting scalar dark matter cloud
• Formation of the seed black holes: a role of quark nuggets?
• Horava-Lifshitz early universe phase transition beyond detailed balance
• A model study of the chiral phase diagram of QCD
• Astro-quark matter: a challenge facing astroparticle physics
• Effective Search Templates for a Primordial Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background
• Towards the understanding of heavy quarks hadronization: from leptonic to heavy-ion collisions
• Deconfinement Transition Effects on Cosmological Parameters and Primordial Gravitational Wave Spectrum
• Astrophysical Quark Matter
• Baryogenesis via Leptogenesis in an inhomogeneous universe
• High-energy heavy-ions physics: from RHIC to LHC
• Production and evaporation of micro black holes as a link between mirror universes
• QCD Cosmology from the Lattice Equation of State
• Diffusion coefficients and constraints on hadronic inhomogeneities in the early universe
• Thermal evolution of dark matter and gravitational-wave production in the early universe from a symplectic glueball model
• Development of the Universe and New Cosmology
• Particle asymmetries in the early universe
• Neutrinos as a probe of curvature
• The cosmic QCD transition for large lepton flavour asymmetries
• Future Experiments in Relativistic Heavy Ion Collisions
• The effect of primordial fluctuations on neutrino oscillations
• An innovative approach for sketching the QCD phase diagram within the NJL model using Lagrange Multipliers
• First second of leptons
• Symmetry breaking patterns for two coupled complex scalar fields at finite temperature and in an external magnetic field
• Photon gas dynamics in the early universe
• AdS/CFT aspects of the cosmological QCD phase transition
• $e^{+}{e}^{-}$ annihilation on the stochastic background of primordial gravitational waves with BKP18
• Heavy-ion collisions - hot QCD in a lab
• Dynamical fermions in lattice quantum chromodynamics