First-order electroweak phase transition in the standard model with a low cutoff

By Christophe Grojean, G. Servant, J. Wells. 2004

287 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the possibility of a first-order electroweak phase transition (EWPT) due to a dimension-six operator in the effective Higgs potential. In contrast with previous attempts to make the EWPT strongly first-order as required by electroweak baryogenesis, we do not rely on large one-loop thermally generated cubic Higgs interactions. Instead, we augment the Standard Model (SM) effective theory with a dimension-six Higgs operator. This addition enables a strong first-order phase transition to develop even with a Higgs boson mass well above the current direct limit of 114 GeV. The phi^6 term can be generated for instance by strong dynamics at the TeV scale or by integrating out heavy particles like an additional singlet scalar field. We discuss conditions to comply with electroweak precision constraints, and point out how future experimental measurements of the Higgs self couplings could test the idea.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/90030e096211b2c1799472c27a412fc4ed42a9de

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Citations in the corpus

Higgs Boson studies at future particle colliders (2019, background): “nt and one can broadly distinguish two scenarios. In the absence of new symmetries T 6=0 and T =0 are directly connected and the Higgs trilinear is expected to be O(1) off its SM prediction (see e.g. [123]). On the other hand in the presence of extra symmetries [124] there could be a further phase s”
Light composite Higgs boson from higher representations versus electroweak precision measurements: P (2005, result): “The resulting effective theory would emerge in a fashion very similar to the toy model presented in [113].”
Probing the Higgs self coupling via single Higgs production at the LHC (2016, background): “[58] and can be easily derived substituting in the potential of Eq.”
The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, background): “The other important example is the dimension-six operator [95, 96], of which the GW signals from PTs were first analyzed in [97] and revisited in [98] with full scope of one-loop effective potential at finite temperature.”
Electroweak phase transition and baryogenesis in composite Higgs models (2018, background): “1) for small h/f to match the coefficients of the Higgs potential in the EFT approach [3], we find that for a constant f , no firstorder phase transition can follow from a negative quartic coupling in the tree-level potential”
Physics opportunities of a 100 TeV proton–proton collider (2015, background): “For example, the potential could trigger symmetry breaking by balancing a negative quartic against a positive sextic [14, 15, 16], i.”
Theoretical uncertainties for cosmological first-order phase transitions (2020, methodology): “Note that SMEFT is frequently used in this way in the literature [25–27, 33, 67–71]”
Gravitational wave production by collisions: more bubbles (2008, background): “This result is especially interesting in the light of recent investigations [7, 8] that indicate that in the case of a first-order electroweak phase transition (obtained by a singlet sector [14, 15] or higher dimensional operators [16]–[18]) the peak frequency of the radiation produced is below the ”
Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, methodology): “Alternatively, the effects of heavy new physics on the PT can be studied and illustrated in a model-independent manner using an effective field theory approach, for instance by adding dimension-6 operators in the Higgs potential allowing for a negative quartic coupling [37, 72]:”