Can the quark-gluon plasma in the early universe be supercooled?

Abstract

The quark-hadron phase transition in the early universe can produce inhomogeneities in the distribution of nucleons, which in turn affect the primordial nucleosynthesis. In all the investigations of this problem it has been assumed that the degree of supercooling of the quark-gluon plasma after the phase transition is large enough to produce a significant rate of nucleation of hadrons. Using the latest results of finite-temperature lattice QCD and the finite-size scaling theory, we argue that the degree of supercooling is in fact extremely small and hence the nucleation rate is negligible.