What happened to the Cosmological QCD Phase Transition?

The scenario that some first-order phase transitions may have taken place in the early Universe offers us one of the most intriguing and fascinating questions in cosmology. Indeed, the role played by the latent "heat" or energy released in the phase transition is highly nontrivial and may lead to some surprising, important results. In this paper, we take the wisdom that the cosmological QCD phase transition, which happened at a time between 10^(-5) sec and 10^(-4) sec or at the temperature of about 150 MeV and accounts for confinement of quarks and gluons to within hadrons, would be of first order. To get the essence out of the scenario, it is sufficient to approximate the true QCD vacuum as one of degenerate theta-vacua and when necessary we try to model it effectively via a complex scalar field with spontaneous symmetry breaking. We examine how and when "pasted" or "patched" domain walls are formed, how long such walls evolve in the long run, and we believe that the significant portion of dark matter could be accounted for in terms of such domain-wall structure and its remnants. Of course, the cosmological QCD phase transition happened in the way such that the false vacua associated with baryons and many other color-singlet objects did not disappear (that is, using the bag-model language, there are bags of radius 1.0 fermi for the baryons) - but the amount of the energy remained in the false vacua is negligible. The latent energy released due to the conversion of the false vacua to the true vacua, in the form of "pasted" or "patched" domain walls in the short run and their numerous evolved objects, should make the concept of the "radiation-dominated" epoch, or of the "matter-dominated" epoch to be re-examined.Comment: 16 pages, 1 figur

Temperature Dependence of Gluon and Quark Condensates as from Linear Confinement

The gluon and quark condensates and their temperature dependence are investigated within QCD premises. The input for the former is a gauge invariant $gg$ kernel made up of the direct (D), exchange (X) and contact(C) QCD interactions in the lowest order, but with the perturbative propagator $k^{-2}$ replaced by a `non-perturbative $k^{-4}$ form obtained via two differentiations: $\mu^2 \partial_m^2 (m^2+k^2)^{-1}$, ($\mu$ a scale parameter), and then setting $m=0$, to simulate linear confinement. Similarly for the input $q{\bar q}$ kernel the gluon propagator is replaced by the above $k^{-4}$ form. With these `linear' simulations, the respective condensates are obtained by `looping' up the gluon and quark lines in the standard manner. Using Dimensional regularization (DR), the necessary integrals yield the condensates plus temperature corrections, with a common scale parameter $\mu$ for both. For gluons the exact result is $$= {36\mu^4}\pi^{-3}\alpha_s(\mu^2)[2-\gamma - 4\pi^2 T^2/(3\mu^2)]$$. Evaluation of the quark condensate is preceded by an approximate solution of the SDE for the mass function $m(p)$, giving a recursive formula, with convergence achieved at the third iteration. Setting the scale parameter $\mu$ equal to the universal Regge slope $1 GeV^2$, the gluon and quark condensates at T=0 are found to be $0.586 Gev^4$ and $(240-260 MeV)^3$ respectively, in fair accord with QCD sum rule values. Next, the temperature corrections (of order $-T^2$ for both condensates) is determined via finite-temperature field theory a la Matsubara. Keywords: Gluon Condensate, mass tensor, gauge invariance, linear confinement, finite-temperature, contour-closing. PACS: 11.15.Tk ; 12.38.Lg ; 13.20.CzComment: 13 pages (LaTeX) including 2 figure

Parity-Violating Nuclear Force as derived from QCD Sum Rules

Parity-violating nuclear force, as may be accessed from parity violation studies in nuclear systems, represents an area of nonleptonic weak interactions which has been the subject of experimental investigations for several decades. In the simple meson-exchange picture, parity-violating nuclear force may be parameterized as arising from exchange of \pi, \rho, \omega, or other meson(s) with strong meson-nucleon coupling at one vertex and weak parity-violating meson-nucleon coupling at the other vertex. The QCD sum rule method allows for a fairly complicated, but nevertheless straightforward, leading-order loop-contribution determination of the various parity-violating MNN couplings starting from QCD (with the nontrivial vacuum) and Glashow-Salam-Weinberg electroweak theory. We continue our earlier investigation of parity-violating \pi NN coupling (by Henley, Hwang, and Kisslinger) to other parity-violating couplings. Our predictions are in reasonable overall agreement with the results estimated on phenomenological grounds, such as in the now classic paper of Desplanques, Donoghue, and Holstein (DDH), in the global experimental fit of Adelberger and Haxton (AH), or the effective field theory (EFT) thinking of Ramsey-Musolf and Page (RP).Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

QCD Sum Rules and Chiral Symmetry Breaking

By matching the world of hadrons to that of some effective chiral quark theory, we determine the induced condensates for QCD sum rules in the presence of an external pion field. The observed values of the strong and weak $\pi NN$ coupling constants are understood.Comment: 20 pages, plain Te

Electromagnetic decays of vector mesons as derived from QCD sum rules

We apply the method of QCD sum rules in the presence of external electromagnetic fields $F_{\mu\nu}$ to the problem of the electromagnetic decays of various vector mesons, such as $\rho\to\pi\gamma$, $K^\ast\to K\gamma$ and $\eta'\to\rho\gamma$. The induced condensates obtained previously from the study of baryon magnetic moments are adopted, thereby ensuring the parameter-free nature of the present calculation. Further consistency is reinforced by invoking various QCD sum rules for the meson masses. The numerical results on the various radiative decays agree very well with the experimental data.Comment: To appear in Phys. Lett.

Parity violation in deuteron photo-disintegration

We analyze the energy dependence for two types of parity-non-conserving (PNC) asymmetries in the reaction $\gamma D\to np$ in the near-threshold region. The first one is the asymmetry in reaction with circularly polarized photon beam and unpolarized deuteron target. The second one corresponds to those with an unpolarized photon beam and polarized target. We find that the two asymmetries have quite different energy dependence, and their shapes are sensitive to the PNC-meson exchange coupling constants. The predictions for the future possible experiments to provide definite constraints for the PNC-coupling constants are discussed.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures. Submitted to Phys.Rev.C 10Oct.0