Speaker
Description
In the Standard Model (SM), the electroweak phase transition – which marked the breaking of the $SU(2) \otimes U(1)$ symmetry through the Higgs mechanism – is predicted to have been a crossover. Several extensions of the SM, however, can realize it as a first-order phase transition (FOPT), which might lead to successful electroweak baryogenesis in the early universe.
A FOPT proceeds through the nucleation of bubbles of the broken Higgs phase, which collide and interact with the surrounding plasma. These interactions are known to be a substantial source of stochastic gravitational waves (GW), and they may be detectable by future space-borne GW interferometers such as LISA. Therefore, they would serve as a probe of fundamental physics complementary to future colliders.
In this talk, I will give a pedagogical introduction to the computation of phase transitions from a quantum field theory perspective. Then, I shall focus on how a strong FOPT can source a detectable GW background and what it can tell us about the underlying fundamental physics.
