PreprintCC BY 4.0arXiv
A Casimir bottleneck in primordial large-N baryon formation
Abstract
We study baryon (β¬) formation in the early Universe in a confining SU(π©) gauge theory with quarks transforming in the fundamental representation. Casimir scaling of the confining potential implies that, at large π©, β¬ formation is hindered by a bottleneck: for small quark clusters, representing the initial stages of β¬ assembly, destruction processes greatly outweigh formation processes. In a β¬-β¬Μ symmetric plasma, the relic density of cosmologically stable β¬'s is set, for large π©, during confinement rather than by annihilation freeze-out. This affects relic-density estimates for SU(π©) dark matter models.
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BibTeX
@misc{luzio2026casimir,
title = {{A Casimir bottleneck in primordial large-N baryon formation}},
author = {Luca Di Luzio and Samuele Di Valeriano and Enrico Nardi},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2609.16123},
eprint = {2609.16123},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16123},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - A Casimir bottleneck in primordial large-N baryon formation
AU - Luca Di Luzio
AU - Samuele Di Valeriano
AU - Enrico Nardi
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/14
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2609.16123
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.16123
AB - We study baryon (β¬) formation in the early Universe in a confining SU(π©) gauge theory with quarks transforming in the fundamental representation. Casimir scaling of the confining potential implies that, at large π©, β¬ formation is hindered by a bottleneck: for small quark clusters, representing the initial stages of β¬ assembly, destruction processes greatly outweigh formation processes. In a β¬-β¬Μ
symmetric plasma, the relic density of cosmologically stable β¬'s is set, for large π©, during confinement rather than by annihilation freeze-out. This affects relic-density estimates for SU(π©) dark matter models.
ER -