2025/12/16 by Issifu, Adamu, Rocha, Julio C. M., Brito, Francisco A. +1
#FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2512.13995
We develop a unified framework in which the dynamics of a scalar glueball field, originating from phenomenological nonperturbative QCD confinement, simultaneously governs the deconfinement transition of strongly interacting matter and drives cosmological inflation. Starting from a temperature-dependent effective potential Veff(ϕ, T), we show that the glueball mass vanishes at a critical temperature Tcϕ, signaling a first-order phase transition characterized by supercooling and a transient metastable vacuum. In the high-temperature regime T > Tcϕ, the deconfined phase naturally produces an exponential expansion of the scale factor, providing the correct conditions for inflation. By computing the slow-roll parameters and the resulting spectral index ns, tensor-to-scalar ratio rs, and running αs, we confront the model with the Planck observations. The predicted values of ns and rs fall within the Planck confidence contours for a broad and physically motivated range of the parameter γ and for N ≈ 50--60 e-folds. A distinctive linear relation, rs = 4(1-ns)-72γ, emerges as a testable signature of the model. Normalization to the observed scalar amplitude further constrains the thermal correction parameter σ2 and the coupling γ, linking cosmological data directly to QCD-scale dynamics. These results demonstrate that a confinement-inspired potential can naturally reproduce the observed inflationary phenomenology and offer a novel bridge between early-universe cosmology and the nonperturbative sector of QCD.