Hydrodynamic Stability of Cosmological Quark-Hadron Phase Transitions

Abstract

Recent results from linear perturbation theory suggest that first-order cosmological quark-hadron phase transitions occurring as deflagrations may be ``borderline'' unstable, and those occurring as detonations may give rise to growing modes behind the interface boundary. However, since nonlinear effects can play important roles in the development of perturbations, unstable behavior cannot be asserted entirely by linear analysis, and the uncertainty of these recent studies is compounded further by nonlinearities in the hydrodynamics and self-interaction fields. In this paper we investigate the growth of perturbations and the stability of quark-hadron phase transitions in the early Universe by solving numerically the fully nonlinear relativistic hydrodynamics equations coupled to a scalar field with a quartic self-interaction potential regulating the transitions. We consider single, perturbed, phase transitions propagating either by detonation or deflagration, as well as multiple phase and shock front interactions in 1+2 dimensional spacetimes.

arXiv comment24 pages, 8 BW figures, 6 color figures; Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D

References in corpus (8)

• The Growth of Bubbles in Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Supersonic Deflagrations in Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Hydrodynamic Stability Analysis of Burning Bubbles in Electroweak Theory and in QCD
• On Bubble Growth and Droplet Decay in Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Instability and Subsequent Evolution of Electroweak Bubbles
• Non-Oscillatory Central Difference and Artificial Viscosity Schemes for Relativistic Hydrodynamics
• Stability of Cosmological Detonation Fronts
• Hydrodynamic Detonation Instability in Electroweak and QCD Phase Transitions

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update
• Cosmos++: Relativistic Magnetohydrodynamics on Unstructured Grids with Local Adaptive Refinement
• Model-independent energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transitions
• Computational Cosmology: from the Early Universe to the Large Scale Structure
• Stability of cosmological deflagration fronts
• Growth rate and the cutoff wavelength of the Darrieus-Landau instability in laser ablation
• Lower bound on the electroweak wall velocity from hydrodynamic instability
• Unveiling the cosmological QCD phase transition through the eLISA/NGO detector
• A cyclic universe with colour fields