Bose and Fermi gases in the early Universe with self-gravitational effect

Abstract

We study the self-gravitational effect on the equation of state (EoS) of Bose and Fermi gases in thermal equilibrium at the end of reheating, the period after quark-hadron transition and before big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). After introducing new grand canonical partition functions based on the work of Uhlenbeck and Gropper, we notice some interesting features of the newly developed EoSs with distinct behaviors of relativistic and nonrelativistic gases under self-gravity. The usual negligence of the self-gravitational effect when solving the background expansion of the early Universe is justified with numerical results, showing the magnitude of the self-gravitational modification of the state constant to be less than $O({10}^{\ensuremath{-}78})$. This helps us to clarify the background thermal evolution of the primordial patch. Such clarification is crucial in testing gravity theories, evaluating inflation models and determining element abundances in BBN.