Related papers: Inflation and Electroweak Symmetry Breaking
The Higgs sector of the Two-Measure Theory (TMT) extension of the electroweak SM (TMSM) is studied in the context of cosmology, where the only non-zero component \varphi(t) of the cosmologically averaged Higgs field plays the role of the…
Although the Higgs potential in the Standard Model (SM) contains only a simple electroweak symmetry breaking vacuum in the small field region, additional metastable or global vacua could exist in models beyond the SM. In this paper, we…
We present an introduction to the basic concepts of electroweak symmetry breaking and Higgs physics within the Standard Model and its supersymmetric extensions. A brief overview will also be given on alternative mechanisms of electroweak…
We propose a new mechanism to generate the electroweak scale within the framework of QCD, which is extended to include conformally invariant scalar degrees of freedom belonging to a larger irreducible representation of $SU(3)_c$. The…
The Higgs field is an attractive candidate for the inflaton because it is an observationally confirmed fundamental scalar field. Importantly, it can be modeled by the most general renormalizable scalar potential. However, if the classical…
The discovery of Higgs mechanism within the context of spontaneous symmetry breaking has offered a new perspective on the early time cosmic inflation and also on the relationship between elementary particles and dark energy, believed to…
We study the stability of the electroweak vacuum in low-scale inflation models whose Hubble parameter is much smaller than the instability scale of the Higgs potential. In general, couplings between the inflaton and Higgs are present, and…
If the recent detection of $B-$mode polarization of the Cosmic Microwave Background by BICEP2 observations, withstand the test of time after the release of recent PLANCK dust polarisation data, then it would surprisingly put the…
We review different avenues of electroweak symmetry breaking explored over the years. This constitutes a timely exercise as the world's largest and the highest energy particle accelerator, namely, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN…
While the LHC takes on the challenge of experimentally exploring the electroweak symmetry breaking sector, it is not only interesting but also crucial to explore alternatives to the Standard Model scenario with an elementary scalar Higgs…
In supersymmetric theories with a strong conformal sector, soft supersymmetry breaking at the TeV scale naturally gives rise to confinement and chiral symmetry breaking at the same scale. We investigate models where such a sector…
The mechanism of "cold electroweak baryogenesis" has been so far unpopular because its proposal has relied on the ad-hoc assumption of a period of hybrid inflation at the electroweak scale with the Higgs acting as the waterfall field. We…
In this work, we investigated the electroweak vacuum instability during or after inflation. In the inflationary Universe, i.e., de Sitter space, the vacuum field fluctuations $\left< {\delta \phi }^{ 2 } \right>$ enlarge in proportion to…
Symmetry breaking in the Higgs field via a non-minimal coupling to gravity or higher-dimensional interactions with the inflaton can lead to condensation at a large vacuum expectation value (VEV) during inflation. After inflation is over,…
In this thesis we study top-condensation models of electroweak symmetry breaking. In particular we investigate a scenario in which the CP symmetry is broken spontaneously due to the same condensates responsible of electroweak symmetry…
The strength of electroweak symmetry breaking may substantially differ in the early Universe compared to the present day value. In the Standard Model, the Higgs vacuum expectation value (vev) vanishes and electroweak symmetry gets restored…
An electroweak model in which the masses of the W and Z bosons and the fermions are generated by quantum loop graphs through a symmetry breaking is investigated. The model is based on a regularized quantum field theory in which the quantum…
In this paper we study a new class of supersymmetric models that can explain a 125 GeV Higgs without fine-tuning. These models contain additional `auxiliary Higgs' fields with large tree-level quartic interaction terms but no Yukawa…
The dynamics of hybrid models is usually approximated by the evolution of a scalar field slowly rolling along a nearly flat valley. Inflation ends with a waterfall phase, due to a tachyonic instability. This final phase is usually assumed…
In models of cosmological inflation motivated by dynamical supersymmetry breaking, the potential driving inflation may be characterized by inverse powers of a scalar field. These models produce observables similar to those typical of the…