Thomas S. Coleman

Effective degrees of freedom during the radiation era

We update the curves of the effective degrees of freedom for the energy density $g_*(T)$ and for the entropy density $g_{*S}(T)$ during the era of radiation domination in the Universe. We find that a plain count of effective degrees of freedom sets an upper limit to the temperature of the quark-hadron transition at $T_c< 235$ MeV for the energy density and $T_c< 245$ MeV for the entropy density.