Published February 15, 1991 | Version v1
Journal article

Spectrum of QCD nucleation-site separations and primordial nucleosynthesis

  • 1. Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Livermore, California 94550 (USA)
  • 2. Physics Department, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093 (USA)

Description

The spectrum of nucleation-site separations in the cosmic QCD phase transition is calculated within the framework of homogeneous nucleation theory. This spectrum has the property that the ratio of the standard deviation of the separations to the mean separation has the constant value of 0.466, independent of any QCD physics parameters. When the assumption is made that a duality exists between nucleation sites and baryon fluctuation sites, the same spectrum may be applied to baryon-number fluctuation separations. When nucleosynthesis results are averaged over this spectrum, the upper limit on Ωb(2.735K/T0)3x(H0/50 km s-1Mpc-1)2, as derived from the observed upper limit to the primordial 4He abundance, drops from 0.8 to 0.56 in baryon inhomogeneous universes. In order for macroscopic baryon inhomogeneities to arise in the early Universe, persist to the era of nucleosynthesis, and give nucleosynthesis yields which allow Ωb to be greater than the limit from standard big-bang nucleosynthesis, the QCD surface tension must be near its upper limit of around the cube of the coexistence temperature

Additional details

Publishing Information

Journal Title
Physical Review, D
Journal Volume
43
Journal Issue
4
Series
Phys. Rev., D.
Journal Page Range
1079-1086
ISSN
0556-2821
CODEN
PRVDA