2011/04/30 by Daniel J. H. Chung, Andrew J. Long, Lian-Tao Wang · 21 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics #Cosmological constant #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Coupling constant #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark energy #Dark matter #Electroweak interaction #Higgs boson #Lambda-CDM model #Particle physics #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum mechanics #Scalar field #Scalar field dark matter #Theoretical physics #Vacuum energy #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.84.043523
published in Physical review. D. Particles, fields, gravitation, and cosmology/Physical review. D. Particles and fields 84(4) (American Physical Society) · 17 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2011/08/10 · openalex publication_date 2011/08/18 · arxiv updated 2015/03/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
The standard model and its extensions predict multiple phase transitions in the early universe. In addition to the electroweak phase transition, one or several of these could occur at energies close to the weak scale. Such phase transitions can leave their imprint on the relic abundance of TeV-scale dark matter. In this paper, we enumerate several physical features of a generic phase transition and parametrize the effect of each on the relic abundance. In particular, we include among these effects the presence of the scalar field vacuum energy and the cosmological constant, which is sensitive to UV physics. Within the context of the standard model Higgs sector, we find that the relic abundance of generic TeV-scale dark matter is affected by the vacuum energy at the order of a fraction of a percent. For scalar field sectors with strong first-order phase transitions, an order 1% apparent tuning of coupling constants may allow corrections induced by the vacuum energy to be of order unity.