Supercooling and Nucleation in Phase Transitions of the Early Universe -

Abstract

The three phase transitions - the GUT, the electro-weak and the quark-hadron, which the universe is assumed to have undergone produce very important physical effects if they are assumed to be of first order. It is also important that enough supercooling is produced at these transitions so that the rate of nucleation of the lower temperature phase out of the higher temperature phase is large. We argue on the basis of finite-size scaling theory that for the quark-hadron and the electro-weak transitions the universe does nor supercool enough to produce sizeable nucleation rates. Only for the GUT transition nucleation probability seems to be significant.