Related papers: Gravitational tests of electroweak relaxation
In the standard picture, the inflationary universe is in a supercooled state which ends with a short time, large scale reheating period, after which the universe goes into a radiation dominated stage. An alternative is proposed here in…
A new interaction that confines the top quark at the electroweak scale is proposed to account for a top quark mass potentially close in value to the electroweak scale.
We analyze the electroweak phase transition at finite temperature in a model of gauge-Higgs unification where the fermion mass hierarchy including top quark mass, a viable electroweak symmetry breaking and an observed Higgs mass are…
Tachyonic preheating is realized when the inflaton repeatedly returns to a convex region of the potential during the post-inflationary oscillating phase. This will induce a strong tachyonic instability and lead to a rapid fragmentation of…
We revisit the original proposal of cosmological relaxation of the electroweak scale by Graham, Kaplan and Rajendran in which the Higgs mass is scanned during inflation by an axion field, the relaxion. We investigate the regime where the…
Extensions of the Standard Model typically contain ``flaton fields" defined as fields with large vacuum expectation values and almost flat potentials where scalar self-coupling is small or vanishes at tree level. Such potentials have been…
The phase diagram of the 2D Ising model confined between two infinite walls and subject to opposing surface fields and to a bulk "gravitational" field is calculated by means of density matrix renormalization methods. In absence of gravity…
We investigate the impact of a semi-decoupled dark sector with a temperature hierarchy relative to the Standard Model plasma on the electroweak phase transition and its associated gravitational wave signal. Working within a minimal…
We construct a phenomenological model of electroweak-scale inflation that is in accordance with recent cosmic microwave background observations by WMAP, while setting the stage for a zero-temperature electroweak transition as assumed in…
We investigate the properties of gravitational waves generated by heating induced phase transitions in warm inflation. In this scenario, the heating phase of inflation followed by subsequent cosmological cooling can trigger two associated…
Evidence from the BICEP2 experiment for a significant gravitational-wave background has focussed attention on inflaton potentials $V(\phi) \propto \phi^\alpha$ with $\alpha=2$ ("chaotic" or "$m^2\phi^2$" inflation) or with smaller values of…
We propose a novel gravitational wave production mechanism in the context of quasi-conformal Standard Model extensions, which provide a way to dynamically generate the electroweak scale. In these models, the cosmic thermal history is…
We study symmetry restoration at finite temperature in the standard model during the electroweak phase transition in the presence of a weak magnetic field. We compute the finite temperature effective potential up to the contribution of ring…
The gravitational interaction among bodies orbiting in a spherical potential leads to the rapid relaxation of the orbital planes' distribution, a process called vector resonant relaxation. We examine the statistical equilibrium of this…
Symmetry restoration processes during the non-equilibrium stage of ``preheating'' after inflation is studied. It is shown that symmetry restoration is very efficient when the majority of created particles are concentrated at energies much…
Taking on a new perspective of the electroweak phase transition, we investigate in detail the role played by the depth of the electroweak minimum ("vacuum energy difference"). We find a strong correlation between the vacuum energy…
Standard theories of electroweak interactions are based on the concept of a gauge symmetry broken by the Higgs mechanism. If they are placed in an environment with a sufficiently high temperature, the symmetry gets restored. It turns out…
We investigate the effects of a large-scale background hypermagnetic field on the electroweak phase transition. We propose a model in which an effective weak angle varies during the electroweak phase transition and upon its use we show…
We discuss the electroweak phase-transition in the early universe, using non-perturbative flow equations for a computation of the free energy. For a scalar mass above $\sim 70$ GeV, high-temperature perturbation theory cannot describe this…
Gravitational waves are generated during first-order phase transitions, either by turbolence or by bubble collisions. If the transition takes place at temperatures of the order of the electroweak scale, the frequency of these gravitational…