Related papers: QCD-induced Electroweak Phase Transition
We study the dynamics of the Peccei-Quinn (PQ) phase transition for the QCD axion. In weakly coupled models the transition is typically second order except in the region of parameters where the PQ symmetry is broken through the…
I consider quantum field theories that admit charged non-topological solitons of the Q-ball type, and use the fact that in a first-order cosmological phase transition, below the critical temperature, there is a value of the soliton charge…
The experimentally measured phase diagram of cuprate superconductors in the temperature-applied magnetic field plane illuminates key issues in understanding the physics of these materials. At low temperature, the superconducting state gives…
We give a general introduction to quantum phase transitions in strongly-correlated electron systems. These transitions which occur at zero temperature when a non-thermal parameter $g$ like pressure, chemical composition or magnetic field is…
We follow the idea that the QCD phase diagram may be described by a crossover from a hadron resonance gas to perturbative QCD using the switch function ansatz of Albright, Kapusta and Young [1]. While the switch function could be calibrated…
We study the finite-temperature properties of the Randall-Sundrum model in the presence of brane-localized curvature. At high temperature, as dictated by AdS/CFT, the theory is in a confined phase dual to the planar AdS black hole. When the…
We discuss the question if the upcoming generation of collider and low-energy experiments can successfully probe the nature of the electroweak phase transition. In particular, we are interested in phase transitions strong enough for…
The paper discusses phenomena close to the critical QCD temperature, using the holographic model. One issue studied is the overcooled high-T phase, in which we calculate quasi normal sound modes. We do not find instabilities associated with…
We present a new perspective on thermal and quantum phase transitions (QPT) in $(2+1)$-dimensional quantum chromodynamics based on symmetries, topology, and quantum dynamical structure of the baryon ground state in the large $N_c$ limit for…
Classical phase transitions, like solid-liquid-gas or order-disorder spin magnetic phases, are all driven by thermal energy fluctuations by varying the temperature. On the other hand, quantum phase transitions happen at absolute zero…
Extensions of the Higgs sector of the Standard Model allow for a rich cosmological history around the electroweak scale. We show that besides the possibility of strong first-order phase transitions, which have been thoroughly studied in the…
The chiral crossover of QCD at finite temperature and vanishing baryon density turns into a second order phase transition if lighter than physical quark masses are considered. If this transition occurs sufficiently close to the physical…
Existence and properties of the electroweak phase transition in the early universe depend strongly on the mass of the Higgs scalar M_H. There is presumably no true symmetry restoration at high temperature. Nevertheless, a first order phase…
Specific heat measurements show that the introduction of amorphous columnar defects considerably affects the transition from the normal to the superconducting state in zero magnetic field. Experimental results are compared to numerical…
This paper is a slightly modified version of the introductory part of a PhD thesis, also containing the articles hep-ph/0303019, hep-ph/0510375 and hep-ph/0512177. We provide a short history of the research of electroweak thermodynamics and…
We consider a phase transition induced by the growth of Q-balls in a false vacuum. Such a transition could occur in the early universe in the case of broken supersymmetry with a metastable false vacuum. Small Q-balls with a negative…
We study the QCD phase transition at finite temperature and discuss the hadron bubble formation in the dual Ginzburg-Landau theory, which is an effective theory of QCD and describes the color confinement via QCD-monopole condensation. We…
Models with radiative symmetry breaking typically feature strongly supercooled first-order phase transitions, which result in an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. In this work, we analyse the role of higher order thermal…
What is the maximum possible strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition and the resulting gravitational wave (GW) signal? While naively one might expect that supercooling could increase the strength of the transition to very…
The quantum chromodynamics (QCD) phase diagram, which reveals the state of strongly interacting matter at different temperatures and densities, is key to answering open questions in physics, ranging from the behavior of particles in neutron…