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If the Hubble constant is extremely large, what will happen with quark confinement?

I guess that quarks will remain confined because of asymptotic freedom. But can gravity or dark energy have any effect on asymptotic freedom? Can gravitational collapse, or a huge cosmological constant, rip a proton apart?

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It seems to me the idea you are talking about is the Big Rip Hypothesis. In this scenario, quarks do eventually de-hadronize and quark confinement fails. As far as I know the idea is a bit out of favor, but not ruled out for our universe. – Logan Maingi May 16 '12 at 20:04
This is adressed by doing QCD on a 4-sphere--- this is the imaginary time deSitter. There is a sphere radius where you transition to a power-law behavior, but it's not a sharp transition, just a smooth crossing over. I saw a reference about a decade ago on this, but memory fails. – Ron Maimon May 16 '12 at 20:23

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