Matter, Dark Matter and Gravitational Waves from a GUT-Scale U(1) Phase Transition (PhD defense)

by Valerie Domcke (DESY)

Wednesday 10 Jul 2013, 14:30 → 15:30 Europe/Berlin

build. 2a, SR 2 (DESY Hamburg)

The decay of a false vacuum of unbroken B−L symmetry is an intriguing and testable mechanism to generate the initial conditions of the hot early universe. If B−L is broken at the grand unification scale, the false vacuum phase yields hybrid inflation, ending in tachyonic preheating. The dynamics of the B−L breaking Higgs field and thermal processes produce an abundance of heavy neutrinos whose decays generate entropy, baryon asymmetry and dark matter. In this talk I discuss phenomenological consequences of such a phase transition in the early universe. The consistency of hybrid inflation, leptogenesis and requiring the correct dark matter abundance implies relations between neutrino parameters and superparticle masses. Moreover, this phase transition generates a gravitational wave background with characteristic features, which might be probed in the near future.