Related papers: QCD Axion Strings or Seeds?
We study the effect of BSM particles receiving most of their mass from their coupling to the Higgs boson ("Loryons") on the electroweak phase transition. The existence of BSM Loryons would imply that electroweak symmetry must be…
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…
We study the system of axion strings that forms in the early Universe if the Peccei-Quinn symmetry is restored after inflation. Using numerical simulations, we establish the existence of an asymptotic solution to which the system is…
We study the occurrence of a strong first-order electroweak phase transition in composite Higgs models. Minimal constructions realising this scenario are based on the coset SO(6)/SO(5) which delivers an extended Higgs sector with an…
We consider a scenario in which the dominant quartic coupling for the Higgs doublets arises from the F-term potential, rather than the conventional SU(2)_L x U(1)_Y D-term potential, in supersymmetric theories. The quartic coupling arises…
We study the early stages of "central" pA and peripheral AA collisions. Several observables indicate that at a sufficiently large number of participant nucleons the system undergoes a transition into a new "explosive" regime. By defining a…
We consider the scenario in which the Peccei-Quinn symmetry breaking is followed by a period of inflation. A particularly interesting case is that the string-domain wall network produced by the symmetry breaking enters the horizon after the…
The quantum properties of a helix-like shaped QCD string are studied in the context of the semi-classical Lund fragmentation model. It is shown how simple quantization rules combined with the causality considerations in the string…
We show that the strong CP problem is solved in a large class of compactifications of string theory. The Peccei-Quinn mechanism solves the strong CP problem if the CP-breaking effects of the ultraviolet completion of gravity and of QCD are…
A discrete symmetry between quarks and (generalized) leptons can exist in nature, and its spontaneous symmetry breaking scale can be as low as a few TeV. Such a discrete symmetry also has interesting implications for how electroweak…
We explore a simple model which naturally explains the observed baryon asymmetry of the Universe. In this model the strong coupling is promoted to a dynamical quantity, which evolves through the vacuum expectation value of a singlet scalar…
If the electroweak sector of the standard model is described by classically conformal dynamics, the early Universe evolution can be substantially altered. It is already known that---contrarily to the standard model case---a first order…
We examine the possibility of necessary and inevitable radiative electroweak symmetry breaking by one-loop radiative corrections in a class of string models which are the string realization of "brane world" scenario. As an example, we…
Inspired by the possibility of high-scale supersymmetry breaking in the string landscape where the cosmological constant problem and the gauge hierarchy problem can be solved while the strong CP problem is still a challenge for naturalness,…
We determine the possible trajectories the universe may have followed in the QCD phase diagram during the QCD epoch. We focus on the roles of chiral symmetry breaking and pion condensation under high imbalances in lepton asymmetry. Adopting…
The QCD axion is investigated within the minimal supersymmetric SO(10) grand unified theory, where the Yukawa sector involves Higgs multiplets ${\bf 10}$ and $\overline{{\bf 126}}$. The relative phase between the VEVs of $({\bf…
In our previous work, we found new types of the cosmic string solutions in the Abelian-Higgs model with an enhanced $U(1)$ global symmetry. We dubbed those solutions as the compensated/uncompensated strings. The compensated string is…
We investigate the possibility that the Peccei-Quinn phase transition occurs at a temperature far below the symmetry breaking scale. Low phase transition temperatures are typical in supersymmetric theories, where symmetry breaking fields…
The global $U_{PQ}(1)$ Peccei-Quinn (PQ) symmetry, proposed to resolve the strong CP problem, predicts the existence of the axion, a pseudo Nambu-Goldstone boson and a leading dark matter candidate. The spontaneous breaking of this symmetry…
We discuss the possibility of breaking the electroweak symmetry in theories with extra dimensions via boundary conditions, without a physical Higgs scalar in the spectrum. In these models the unitarity violation scale can be delayed via the…