Cosmological probes of electroweak symmetry breaking
by
Thomas Konstandin(DESY)
→
Europe/Berlin
Auditorium (DESY Hamburg)
Auditorium
DESY Hamburg
Description
The Large Hadron Collider at CERN currently investigates how the electroweak symmetry is broken in Nature. In the Standard Model, this amounts to studying the elusive Higgs particle. However, the scalar sector could contain more than just one Higgs field and comprise a much richer structure. In this case, the breaking of the electroweak symmetry via a phase transition can have far-reaching implications in cosmology. For example, the observation of gravitational waves can provide information on how the electroweak symmetry was broken during the course of the Universe that is complementary to collider experiments. In this talk, I review the basic properties of cosmological phase transitions and discuss the related cosmological probes.
