Peaks above the Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum due to the Quark-Gluon to Hadron Transition

Abstract

The quark-gluon to hadron transition affects the evolution of cosmological perturbations. If the phase transition is first order, the sound speed vanishes during the transition, and density perturbations fall freely. This distorts the primordial Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum of density fluctuations below the Hubble scale at the transition. Peaks are produced, which grow at most linearly in wavenumber, both for the hadron-photon-lepton fluid and for cold dark matter. For cold dark matter which is kinetically decoupled well before the QCD transition clumps of masses below $10^{-10} M_\odot$ are produced.