Related papers: Higgs Cosmology and Dark Matter
The discovery of the Standard Model Higgs boson opens up a range of speculative cosmological scenarios, from the formation of structure in the early universe immediately after the big bang, to relics from the electroweak phase transition…
The Higgs mechanism is one of the central pieces of the Standard Model of electroweak interactions and thanks to it we can generate the masses of the elementary particles. Its fundamental origin is nonetheless unknown. Furthermore, in order…
The observed value of the Higgs mass indicates an instability of the Higgs scalar at large energy scales, and hence also at large field values. In the context of early universe cosmology, this is often considered to lead to problems. Here…
The existence of exact solutions which represent a lattice of black holes at a scalar-field-dominated cosmological bounce suggests that black holes could persist through successive eras of a cyclic cosmology. Here we explore some remarkable…
In this letter we address some of the issues raised in the literature about the conflict between a large vacuum energy density, apriori predicted by quantum field theory, and the observed dark energy which must be the energy of vacuum or…
Primordial black holes are a viable dark matter candidate. They decay via Hawking evaporation. Energetic particles from the Hawking radiation interact with interstellar gas, depositing their energy as heat and ionization. For a sufficiently…
The energy injection through Hawking evaporation has been used to put strong constraints on primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate at masses below $10^{17}\,\rm{g}$. However, Hawking's semiclassical approximation breaks down at…
The spontaneous symmetry breaking for the massless scalar field naturally arises from the framework of the effective theory (the non-minimal coupling of gravity to a scalar field). A magic key ingredient is to add the large vacuum energy…
We propose a possible resolution to the cosmological constant problem through a scenario in which the universe is composed of three components: matter, radiation (CMB) and vacuum energy such that vacuum energy is not constant and is…
It is proposed that the Higgs vacuum possesses a small-scale structure that can explain the large discrepancy between the predicted electroweak vacuum energy density and the observed cosmological constant. An effective Lagrangian…
The possibility that the dark matter comprises primordial black holes (PBHs) is considered, with particular emphasis on the currently allowed mass windows at $10^{16}$ - $10^{17}\,$g, $10^{20}$ - $10^{24}\,$g and $1$ - $10^{3}\,M_{\odot}$.…
From an observational perspective cosmology is today in excellent shape - advances in instrumentation and data processing have enabled us to study the universe in detail back to when the first galaxies formed, map the fluctuations in the…
If the cosmological dark matter is primarily in the form of an elementary particle which has cross section and mass for self-interaction having a ratio similar to that of ordinary nuclear matter, then seed black holes (formed in stellar…
We consider two problems that have vexed physicists for several decades -- dark matter and the cosmological constant. The problem has been that the former has not been detected while the latter gives a far higher value than detected by…
In post LHC era the old idea of cosmological vacuum relaxation of the Higgs mass that does not require any new physics in the vicinity of LHC energies acquires a new meaning. I discuss how this concept of naturanless differs from the…
High energy collisions of particles may have created tiny black holes in the early Universe, which might leave stable remnants instead of fully evaporating as a result of Hawking radiation. If the reheating temperature was sufficiently…
Generic constraints on dark photons are generally presented assuming they have Stueckelberg masses. These constraints are strengthened if instead the mass is due to the Higgs mechanism and the dark Higgs is light. First, we show that under…
The accelerating expansion of the Universe points to a small positive vacuum energy density and negative vacuum pressure. A strong candidate is the cosmological constant in Einstein's equations of General Relativity. The vacuum dark energy…
If the Standard Model (SM) of elementary particle physics is assumed to hold good to arbitrarily high energies, then, for the best fit values of the parameters, the scalar potential of the Standard Model Higgs field turns negative at a high…
The Higgs field is conventionally treated as a small local perturbation atop a large, constant vacuum value that uniformly permeates the universe. I propose instead that in regions of extreme gravitational intensity -- such as near…