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Updated: Sep 11, 2025
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Investigation of Early Plasma Evolution Induced by Ultrashort Laser Pulses
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Phase Transitions in an Expanding Medium: Hot Remnants.
Romuald A Janik1, Matti Järvinen2,3, Jacob Sonnenschein4
1Jagiellonian University, Institute of Theoretical Physics and Mark Kac Center for Complex Systems Research, Łojasiewicza 11, 30-348 Kraków, Poland.
Physical Review Letters
|August 12, 2025
Summary
We studied a phase transition in an expanding universe. Hot plasma remnants persisted, resisting cooling and bubble nucleation, even under cosmological expansion.
Area of Science:
- High Energy Physics
- Cosmology
- Quantum Field Theory
Background:
- Understanding the early universe requires studying phase transitions in expanding media.
- Holographic models provide insights into strongly coupled quantum field theories.
Purpose of the Study:
- To analyze the dynamics of confinement-deconfinement phase transitions in expanding systems.
- To investigate the behavior of hot plasma remnants during expansion.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an effective boundary description.
- Fitted the description to the holographic Witten model.
- Simulated dynamics in boost-invariant and cosmological expansion scenarios.
Main Results:
- Observed persistent hot plasma remnants that did not cool down.
- These remnants resisted bubble nucleation despite system expansion.
- Dynamics of remnant shrinking, dissolution, and reheating were robust across different expansion models.
Conclusions:
- Hot plasma remnants exhibit stable behavior during expansion, challenging typical phase transition expectations.
- The findings are consistent in both Minkowski and Friedmann-Robertson-Walker spacetimes.
- This robustness suggests fundamental properties of such remnants in expanding universes.
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