2011/04/25 by Thomas Konstandin, Geraldine Servant, Géraldine Servant · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Baryogenesis #Cold dark matter #Conformal symmetry #Cosmology #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #Dark matter #Electroweak interaction #Electroweak scale #False vacuum #Inflation (cosmology) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2011/12/009
22 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2011/04/25 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/09 · arxiv updated 2015/05/28 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Nearly conformal dynamics at the TeV scale as motivated by the hierarchy problem can be characterized by a stage of significant supercooling at the electroweak epoch. This has important cosmological consequences. In particular, a common assumption about the history of the universe is that the reheating temperature is high, at least high enough to assume that TeV-mass particles were once in thermal equilibrium. However, as we discuss in this paper, this assumption is not well justified in some models of strong dynamics at the TeV scale. We then need to reexamine how to achieve baryogenesis in these theories as well as reconsider how the dark matter abundance is inherited. We argue that baryonic and dark matter abundances can be explained naturally in these setups where reheating takes place by bubble collisions at the end of the strongly first-order phase transition characterizing conformal symmetry breaking, even if the reheating temperature is below the electroweak scale ∼ 100 GeV. In particular, non-thermal production of heavy WIMPs during bubble collisions becomes a well-motivated possibility. We also discuss inflation as well as gravity wave smoking gun signatures of this class of models.