Glueballs Confinement and Cosmological Phase Transitions

Adamu Issifu; Julio C. M. Rocha; Francisco A. Brito; Tobias Frederico

Paper

Glueballs Confinement and Cosmological Phase Transitions

Abstract

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

, we show that the glueball mass vanishes at a critical temperature

, signaling a first-order phase transition characterized by supercooling and a transient metastable vacuum. In the high-temperature regime

, 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

, tensor-to-scalar ratio

, and running

, we confront the model with the Planck observations. The predicted values of

and

fall within the Planck confidence contours for a broad and physically motivated range of the parameter

and for

e-folds. A distinctive linear relation,

, emerges as a testable signature of the model. Normalization to the observed scalar amplitude further constrains the thermal correction parameter

and the coupling

, 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.