Roughly a microsecond after the big-bang, the universe was too hot and dense to form the protons or neutrons of quotidian matter. The process in which a hot soup of quarks and gluons coalesced into standard matter was strongly-coupled and dynamical, making it difficult to analyze with standard techniques such as perturbative QFT and lattice simulations. This thesis showcases various attempts at better understanding this enigmatic phenomenon: effective field theory (Phys.Lett.B 23), CFT approaches to quantum information theory (JHEP 24, JHEP 25), and Energy-Energy Correlators (forthcoming)
Thesis committee: Ian Moult (advisor), David Poland, Laura Havener, Ben Machta
