The quark gluon plasma equation of state and the expansion of the early Universe

Our knowledge of the equation of state of the quark gluon plasma has been continuously growing due to the experimental results from heavy ion collisions, due to recent astrophysical measurements and also due to the advances in lattice QCD calculations. The new findings about this state may have consequences on the time evolution of the early Universe, which can be estimated by solving the Friedmann equations. The solutions of these equations give the time evolution of the energy density and also of the temperature in the beginning of the Universe. In this work we compute the time evolution of the QGP in the early Universe, comparing several equations of state, some of them based on the MIT bag model (and on its variants) and some of them based on lattice QCD calculations. Among other things, we investigate the effects of a finite baryon chemical potential in the evolution of the early Universe. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.