Cosmological QCD phase transition in steady non-equilibrium dissipative Horava-Lifshitz early universe

We study the phase transition from quark-gluon plasma to hadrons in the early universe in the context of non-equilibrium thermodynamics. According to the standard model of cosmology, a phase transition associated with chiral symmetry breaking after the electro-weak transition has occurred when the universe was about 1-10 mu s old. We focus attention on such a phase transition in the presence of a viscous relativistic cosmological background fluid in the framework of non-detailed balance Horava-Lifshitz cosmology within an effective model of QCD. We consider a flat Friedmann-Robertson-Walker universe filled with a non-causal and a causal bulk viscous cosmological fluid respectively and investigate the effects of the running coupling constants of Horava-Lifshitz gravity, lambda, on the evolution of the physical quantities relevant to a description of the early universe, namely, the temperature T, scale factor a, deceleration parameter q and dimensionless ratio of the bulk viscosity coefficient to entropy density xi/s. We assume that the bulk viscosity cosmological background fluid obeys the evolution equation of the steady truncated (Eckart) and full version of the Israel-Stewart fluid, respectively. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.