Early Cosmological Period of QCD Confinement

Abstract: If the strong coupling is promoted to a dynamical field-dependent quantity, it is possible that the strong force looked very different in the early Universe. We consider a scenario in which the dynamics is such that QCD confines at high temperatures with a large dynamical scale, relaxing back to ~1 GeV before big bang nucleosynthesis. We discuss the cosmological implications and explore potential applications, including fleshing out a new mechanism for baryogenesis which opens up if QCD confines before the electroweak phase transition of the Standard Model.