Speaker
Description
Electroweak phase transitions in the early Universe are widely studied because they can provide the out-of-equilibrium conditions needed for baryogenesis. We consider a two-field scenario where an extra real scalar field is coupled to the Higgs field, and the thermal history happens in two steps: first, the scalar field develops a non-zero vacuum expectation value while the Higgs vacuum expectation value stays zero; later, the roles switch so that the scalar vacuum expectation value goes back to zero and the Higgs vacuum expectation value becomes non-zero, completing the electroweak transition. Our main goal is to measure how far apart these two transitions can be in temperature, i.e., how large the temperature gap can be between the onset of the scalar phase and the nucleation of the Higgs transition. We focus on transitions in the electroweak range from roughly 10 GeV up to 1 TeV, and discuss how making the two steps more separated can affect a baryogenesis scenario.
| Keyword-1 | Beyond Standard Model (BSM) |
|---|---|
| Keyword-2 | Phase Transition |
| Keyword-3 | Gravitational Waves |