A quark-gluon plasma inspired model of the universe: Introduction and Inflation

We explain how a SU(N_c) gauge theory, decoupled from the standard model and with a high-lying strong coupling scale, can incorporate apparently unrelated cosmological features, such as Inflation and dark matter, using well-understood dynamics from Quark-Gluon Plasma Physics. In our scenario, the evolution of the universe is throughoutly hot: Inflation occurs due to the bulk viscosity peak during the mixed phase to deconfinement, while dark matter is composed of weakly interacting glueballs formed in the same phase. We parametrize the temperature dependence of the EoS and the viscosity expected from gauge theory, solve the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker (FRW) equations and compute the number of efoldings as a function of the free parameters of the model.