0000000000142414
AUTHOR
Dietrich Bödeker
Cosmic QCD Epoch at Nonvanishing Lepton Asymmetry
We investigate how a lepton asymmetry impacts the cosmic trajectory in the QCD phase diagram. We study the evolution of chemical potentials during the QCD epoch of the early Universe using susceptibilities from lattice QCD to interpolate between an ideal quark gas and an ideal hadron resonance gas. The lepton asymmetry affects the evolution of all chemical potentials. The standard cosmic trajectory is obtained assuming tiny lepton and baryon asymmetries. For larger lepton asymmetry, the charge chemical potential exceeds the baryon chemical potential before pion annihilation.
Lepton flavor asymmetries and the mass spectrum of primordial black holes
We study the influence of lepton flavour asymmetries on the formation and the mass spectrum of primordial black holes. We estimate the detectability of their mergers with LIGO/Virgo and show that the currently published gravitational wave events may actually be described by a primordial black hole spectrum from non-zero asymmetries. We suggest to use gravitational-wave astronomy as a novel tool to probe how lepton flavour asymmetric the Universe has been before the onset of neutrino oscillations.