Probing the Early Universe

Dear Colleagues,

We will here give a wide definition of the concept “Early Universe”. Therefore, we will include not only the first moments, such as the inflationary era lasting about 10^-33 s, the time when the asymmetry between matter and antimatter appeared, the first ten minutes with cosmic nucleosynthesis, and the time about 380,000 years later when the universe became transparent for the radiation which now makes up the cosmic microwave background, but also the time afterward up to one billion years after the inflationary era, when the first stars and galaxies appeared, and the reionization of the cosmic matter happened. New observational results obtained for example by means of the James Webb Telescope are welcome. We want to invite you to contribute a scientific article with new results or a review article to this Special Issue.

Prof. Dr. Øyvind Grøn
Guest Editor

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• the Planck era (t < 10^-43 s)
• grand unification era (t < 10^-36 s)
• the inflationary era (t < 10^-33 s)
• electroweak epoch (10^-33 s < t < 10^-12 s)
• quark era (10^-12 s < t < 10^-5 s)
• hadron era (10^-5 s < t < 1 s)
• lepton era with neutrino decoupling (1 s < t < 10 s)
• cosmic nucleosynthesis (10 s < t < 1000 s)
• radiation dominated and ‘foggy’ era (1000 s < t < 380,000 years)
• recombination (18,000 years < t < 380,000 years)
• the dark era (380,000 years < t < 150 million years)
• first stars and galaxies (200 to 400 million years)
• cosmic reionization (200 million to 1 billion years)