We discuss possibilities to observe stochastic gravitational wave backgrounds produced by the electroweak phase transition in the early universe. Once the first-order phase transition occurs, which is still predicted in a lot of theories beyond the standard model, collisions of nucleated vacuum bubbles and induced turbulent motions can become significant sources of the gravitational waves. Detections of such gravitational wave backgrounds are expected to reveal the Higgs sector physics. In particular, through pulsar timing experiments planned in Square Kilometre Array (SKA) under construction, we will be able to detect the gravitational wave in near future and distinguish particle physics models by comparing the theoretical predictions to the observations.
Extending previous work, we calculate the electroweak potentials for all co-annihilation channels of wino dark matter at the one-loop order and obtain the wino relic abundance including the Sommerfeld effect at the next-to-leading order (NLO).
We analyze the validity of the theorems concerning the cancellation of the infrared and collinar divergences in the case of dark matter freeze-out in the early universe. In particular, we compute the electroweak logarithmic corrections of infrared origin to the annihilation cross section of a dark matter particle being the neutral component of a SU(2)_L multiplet. The inclusion of processes with final state W can modify significantly the cross sections computed with only virtual W exchange. Our results show that the inclusion of infrared logs is necessary for a precise computation of the dark …
We discuss the relic density of the lightest of the supersymmetric particles ({\small LSP}) in view of new cosmological data, which favour the concept of an accelerating Universe with a non-vanishing cosmological constant. The new bound on the Cold Dark Matter density, $Ω_{\mathrm{CDM}} h_0^2 \lesssim 0.22$, puts stringent constraints on supersymmetry preferring low supersymmetry breaking scales, in sharp contrast to electroweak precision measurements favouring large supersymmetry breaking scales. Supersymmetric predictions are in agreement with cosmological data and electroweak precision data…
Accepting the fine tuned cosmological constant hypothesis, we have recently proposed that this hypothesis can be tested if the dark matter freeze out occurs at the electroweak scale and if one were to measure an anomalous shift in the dark matter relic abundance. In this paper, we numerically compute this relic abundance shift in the context of explicit singlet extensions of the Standard Model and explore the properties of the phase transition which would lead to the observationally most favorable scenario. Through the numerical exploration, we explicitly identify a parameter space in a single…
Particle production at the end of a first-order electroweak phase transition may be rather generic in theories beyond the standard model. Dark matter may then be abundantly produced by this mechanism if it has a sizable coupling to the Higgs field. For an electroweak phase transition occuring at a temperature T_EW ~ 50-100 GeV, non-thermally generated dark matter with mass M_X > TeV will survive thermalization after the phase transition, and could then potentially account for the observed dark matter relic density in scenarios where a thermal dark matter component is either too small or absent…
In this work, we investigate the possibility to realize inflation and strong first order electroweak phase transitions(SFOEWPT) together with the relic density explanation. We studied the usual Higgs-portal real singlet dark matter model and the global U(1) breaking complex singlet model with the pseudoscalar being dark matter candidate. We focus on higher dark matter parameter regions due to the lower dark matter masses region are almost excluded by the current direct detection experiments except that of the so-called ${\it Higgs~ funnel ~regime}$ with $m_{DM}\sim m_h/2$. In both models, the …
We study the dilution of dark matter (DM) relic density caused by the electroweak first-order phase transition (FOPT) in the singlet extension models, including the singlet extension of the standard model (xSM), of the two-Higgs-doublet model (2HDM+S) and the next-to-minimal supersymmetric standard model (NMSSM). We find that in these models the entropy released by the strong electroweak FOPT can dilute the DM density to 1/3 at most. Nevertheless, in the xSM and NMSSM where the singlet field configure is relevant to the phase transition temperature, the strong FOPT always happens before the DM…
We revisit the theory and phenomenology of scalar electroweak multiplet thermal dark matter. We derive the most general, renormalizable scalar potential, assuming the presence of the Standard Model Higgs doublet, $H$, and an electroweak multiplet $Φ$ of arbitrary SU(2$)_L$ rank and hypercharge, $Y$. We show that, in general, the $Φ$-$H$ Higgs portal interactions depend on three, rather than two independent couplings as has been previously considered in the literature. For the phenomenologically viable case of $Y=0$ multiplets, we focus on the septuplet and quintuplet cases, and consider the in…
We reconsider the problem of the birefringence of electromagnetic (EM) waves in a medium consisting of a plasma and a $ν\barν$-gas within the Standard Model of particle physics. The considered effect arises in such a medium due to the parity violation for the electroweak neutrino-electron interaction. Our recent calculations of the electroweak correction to the photon polarization operator in the electroweak plasma allow us to significantly improve some previous estimates of such effect in astrophysics. We estimate the rotary power for EM waves propagating in a non-relativistic plasma in the i…
In this Letter, we propose a new possible connection between dark matter relic density and baryon asymmetry of the universe. The portal between standard model sector and dark matter not only controls the relic density and detections of dark matter, but also allows the dark matter to trigger the first order electroweak phase transition. We discuss systematically possible scalar dark matter candidates, starting from a real singlet to arbitrary high representations. We show that the simplest realization is provided by a doublet, and that strong first-order electroweak phase transition implies a l…
The diffuse backgrounds of relic gravitons with frequencies ranging between the aHz band and the GHz region encode the ultimate information on the primeval evolution of the plasma and on the underlying theory of gravity well before the electroweak epoch. While the temperature and polarization anisotropies of the microwave background radiation probe the low-frequency tail of the graviton spectra, during the next score year the pulsar timing arrays and the wide-band interferometers (both terrestrial and hopefully space-borne) will explore a much larger frequency window encompassing the nHz domai…
We revisit the big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) limits on primordial magnetic fields and/or turbulent motions accounting for the decaying nature of turbulent sources between the time of generation and BBN. This leads to larger estimates for the gravitational wave (GW) signal than previously expected. We address the detection prospects through space-based interferometers (for GWs generated around the electroweak energy scale) as well as pulsar timing arrays and astrometric missions (for GWs generated around the quantum chromodynamics energy scale).
We revise a problem of the birefringence of electromagnetic waves in a chiral medium in the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics arising in an isotropic plasma due to parity violation. The recent calculations of the weak correction to the photon polarization operator in electroweak plasma allow significantly to improve some previous estimates of such effect in astrophysics. Nevertheless, it has remained beyond the abilities of the present technics yet.
We present the full $\mathcal{O}(α_s)$ supersymmetric QCD corrections for stop-anti-stop annihilation into electroweak final states within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model (MSSM). We also incorporate Coulomb corrections due to gluon exchange between the incoming stops. Numerical results for the annihilation cross sections and the predicted neutralino relic density are presented. We show that the impact of the radiative corrections on the cosmologically preferred region of the parameter space can become larger than the current experimental uncertainty, shifting the relic bands within t…
Phenomenology of relic neutralinos is analyzed in an effective supersymmetric scheme at the electroweak scale. It is shown that current direct experiments for WIMPs, when interpreted in terms of relic neutralinos, are indeed probing regions of supersymmetric parameter space compatible with all present experimental bounds.
We study the radiative electroweak symmetry breaking and the relic abundance of neutralino dark matter in the supersymmetric type I seesaw model. In this model, there exist threshold corrections to Higgs bilinear terms coming from heavy singlet sneutrino loops, which make the soft supersymmetry breaking (SSB) mass for up-type Higgs shift at the seesaw scale and thus a minimization condition for the Higgs potential is affected. We show that the required fine-tuning between the Higgsino mass parameter mu and the SSB mass for up-type Higgs may be reduced at the electroweak scale, due to the thres…
Non-zero neutrino mass and dark matter cast a shadow over the success of the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics. The most straightforward extension of the SM to explain these two phenomena is the Scotogenic model, where the SM particle spectrum extends with three isospin singlet right-handed neutrinos and one doublet scalar while all of these being odd under $Z_2$ symmetry. In this work, we have considered the lightest right-handed neutrino as the dark matter candidate and freeze-out mechanism for producing observed dark matter relic density. The observed dark matter relic density, neutri…
We study the production of relic gravitational waves (GWs) in turbulent hypermagnetic fields (HMFs) in the symmetric phase of the early universe before the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). The noise of HMFs is modeled by the analog of the magnetic hydrodynamics turbulence. The evolution of HMFs is driven by the analogs of the chiral magnetic effect and the Adler anomalies in the presence of the nonzero asymmetries of leptons and Higgs bosons. We track the evolution of the energy density of GWs from 10 TeV down to EWPT and analyze its dependence on the parameters of the system. We also disc…
We consider long-lived relic particles as the source of the PeV-scale neutrinos detected at the IceCube observatory over the last six years. We derive the present day neutrino flux, including primary neutrinos from direct decays, secondary neutrinos from electroweak showering, and tertiary neutrinos from re-scatters off the relic neutrino background. We compare the high-energy neutrino flux prediction to the most recently available datasets and find qualitative differences to expected spectra from other astrophysical processes. We utilize electroweak corrections to constrain heavy decaying rel…
We examine the properties of relic neutralinos in the regions of the parameter space selected by recent fits to all the electroweak observables within the Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model. We discuss the relic neutralino cosmic abundance and the direct detection rates for these most likely supersymmetric configurations. We employ the relevant experimental bounds to constrain the set of the best-fit configurations and discuss the discovery potential of the direct search for relic neutralinos.
We show that any massive cosmological relic particle with small self-interactions is a super-fluid today, due to the broadening of its wave packet, and lack of any elastic scattering. The WIMP dark matter picture is only consistent its mass $M \gg M_{\rm Pl}$ in order to maintain classicality. The dynamics of a super-fluid are given by the excitation spectrum of bound state quasi-particles, rather than the center of mass motion of constituent particles. If this relic is a fermion with a repulsive interaction mediated by a heavy boson, such as neutrinos interacting via the $Z^0$, the condensate…
We examine the relic density of the light mass dark matter region in the inert doublet model (IDM) when the dominant process is due to co-annihilation between the lightest neutral scalars of the model. The full one-loop electroweak corrections are computed in an on-shell scheme and are found to be well approximated as an effective cross-section expressed in terms of $Z$-observables. The electroweak corrections to the subdominant process which consists of an annihilation into an on-shell $W$ and an off-shell $W$, that is calculated as a annihilation into a 3-body final state, is also performed.…
In this paper, the electroweak phase transition, the gravitational waves and the dark matter issues are investigated in two scalar singlet extension of the standard model. The detectability of the gravitational wave signals are discussed by comparing the results with the sensitivity curves of $\mathbf{eLISA}$, $\mathbf{ALIA}$, $\mathbf{DECIGO}$ and $\mathbf{BBO}$ detectors. It is shown that the results support the recent reports on the dark matter relic density by $\mathbf{Planck}$ $\mathbf{2018}$ collaboration and the direct detection experiment by $\mathbf{XENON1T}$ $\mathbf{2018}$ collabora…
Sub-GeV thermal relic dark matter typically requires the existence of a light mediator particle. We introduce the light two-Higgs-doublet portal, illustrated by a minimal UV-complete model for sub-GeV dark matter with kinematically forbidden annihilations into leptons. All new physics states in this scenario lie at or below the electroweak scale, affecting Higgs physics, the muon anomalous magnetic moment and potentially neutrino masses. Observation of radiative dark matter annihilation by future MeV gamma-ray telescopes would be key to unambiguously identify the scenario.
We study a dynamical freeze-in production of the dark matter considering the electroweak phase transition history of the Universe. The kinematical thresholds of the decay and scattering processes for the dark matter production can be altered by the temperature dependent thermal masses of particles, which might lead to enhancement or reduction of the dark matter relic abundance. The second-stage strongly first-order electroweak phase transition (SFOEWPT) triggered by the hidden scalars can be probed at colliders and the gravitational wave detectors. The two-step SFOEWPT modified late decay FIMP…
Relatively light electroweak superparticle masses are required to satisfy the bulk annihilation region of dark matter relic density and account for the observed excess of muon g-2, while TeV scale squark and gluino masses are required to account for the 125 GeV Higgs boson mass and the negative SUSY search results from LHC. These two sets of requirements can be reconciled in a simple nonuniversal gaugino mass model, which assumes SUSY breaking via a combination of two superfields belonging to the singlet and the 200-plet representations of the GUT group SU(5). The model can be probed via squar…
Electroweak Symmetry Breaking (EWSB) is known to produce a massive universe that we live in. However, it may also provide an important boundary for freeze-in or freeze-out of dark matter (DM) connected to Standard Model via Higgs portal as processes contributing to DM relic differ across the boundary. We explore such possibilities in a two-component DM framework, where a massive $U(1)_X$ gauge boson DM freezes-in and a scalar singlet DM freezes-out, that inherits the effect of EWSB for both the cases in a correlated way. Amongst different possibilities, we study two sample cases; first when on…
We show that "accidental" supersymmetry is a beyond-the-Standard Model framework that naturally accommodates a thermal relic dark matter candidate and successful electroweak baryogenesis, including the needed strongly first-order character of the electroweak phase transition. We study the phenomenology of this setup from the standpoint of both dark matter and baryogenesis. For energies around the electroweak phase transition temperature, the low-energy effective theory is similar to the MSSM with light super-partners of the third-generation quarks and of the Higgs and gauge bosons. We calculat…
The neutrino asymmetry in the early universe plasma, $n_ν- n_{\bar ν}$, is calculated both before and after the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). In the Standard Model before EWPT, the leptogenesis is well known to be driven by the abelian anomaly in a massless hypercharge field. The generation of the neutrino asymmetry in the Higgs phase after EWPT, in its turn, has not been considered previously because of the absence of any quantum anomaly in an external electromagnetic field for such electroneutral particles as neutrino, unlike the Adler-Bell-Jackiw anomaly for charged left and right po…
The Minimal Supersymmetric Standard Model has a candidate dark matter particle in its spectrum and may be able to generate the baryon asymmetry of the Universe (BAU) at the electroweak phase transition. In the Constrained MSSM, we find the area of parameter space which is allowed by accelerator and precision tests, which produces a relic dark matter abundance in the observationally favored window 0.1<Omega h^2<0.3, and where baryon plus lepton number violating processes are out of equilibrium after the electroweak phase transition.
We forecast the prospective of detection for a stochastic gravitational wave background sourced by cosmological first-order phase transitions. We focus on first-order phase transitions with negligible plasma effects, and consider the experimental infrastructures built by the end of the LISA mission. We make manifest the synergy among LISA, pulsar time array experiments, and ground-based interferometers. For phase transitions above the TeV scale or below the electroweak scale, LISA can detect the corresponding gravitational wave signal together with Einstein Telescope, SKA or even aLIGO-aVIRGO-…
We study a conformal version of the Standard Model (SM), which apart from SM sector, containing a $ U_{D}(1) $ dark sector with a vector dark matter candidate and a scalar field (scalon). In this model the dark sector couples to the SM sector via a Higgs portal. The theory is scale-invariant in lowest order, therefore the spontaneous symmetry breaking of scale invariance entails the existence of a scalar particle, scalon, with vanishing zeroth-order mass. However, one-loop corrections break scale invariance, so they give mass to the scalon. Because of the scale invariance, our model is subject…
The simplest extension of the Standard Model by only one real singlet scalar can explain the observed dark matter relic density while giving simultaneously a strongly first-order electroweak phase transition in the early universe. However, after imposing the invisible Higgs decay constraint from the LHC, the parameter space of the single scalar model shrinks to regions with only a few percent of the DM relic abundance and when adding the direct detection bound, e.g. from XENON100, it gets excluded completely. In this paper, we extend the Standard Model with two real guage singlet scalars, here…
We consider an isolated electroweak monopole solution within the Standard Model with a non-linear Born-Infeld extension of the hypercharge gauge field. Monopole (and dyon) solutions in such an extension are regular and their masses are predicted to be proportional to the Born-Infeld mass parameter. We argue that cosmological production of electroweak monopoles may delay the electroweak phase transition and make it more strongly first order for monopole masses $M\gtrsim 9.3\cdot 10^3$ TeV, while the nucleosynthesis constraints on the abundance of relic monopoles impose the bound $M\lesssim 2.3\…
The inert doublet dark matter model has recently gained attention as a possible means of facilitating a strongly first order electroweak phase transition (EWPT), as needed for baryogenesis. We extend previous results by considering the regime where the DM is heavier than half the Higgs mass, and its relic density is determined by annihilation into W, Z and Higgs bosons. We find a large natural region of parameter space where the EWPT is strongly first order, while the lightest inert doublet state typically contributes only 0.1-3% of the total dark matter. Despite this small density, its intera…
If the Higgs boson H couples to a singlet scalar S via lambda_m |H|^2 S^2, a strong electroweak phase transition can be induced through a large potential barrier that exists already at zero temperature. In this case properties of the phase transition can be computed analytically. We show that electroweak baryogenesis can be achieved using CP violation from a dimension-6 operator that couples S to the top-quark mass, suppressed by a new physics scale that can be well above 1 TeV. Moreover the singlet is a dark matter candidate whose relic density is < 3% of the total dark matter density, but wh…
The neutrino asymmetry in the early universe plasma, $n_ν- n_{\bar ν}$, is calculated both before and after the electroweak phase transition (EWPT). The leptogenesis before EWPT within the standard model is well known to be driven by the abelian anomaly in a massless hypercharge field. The generation of the neutrino asymmetry in the Higgs phase after EWPT, in its turn, has not been considered previously because of the absence of any quantum anomaly in an external electromagnetic field for such electroneutral particles as neutrino, unlike the Adler anomaly for charged left and right polarized m…
A stochastic background of gravitational waves can be generated during a cosmological first order phase transition, at least by two distinct mechanisms: collisions of true vacuum bubbles and turbulence in the cosmic fluid. I compare these two contributions, analyzing their relative importance for a generic phase transition. In particular, a first order electroweak phase transition is expected to generate a gravitational wave signal peaked at a frequency which today falls just within the band of the planned space interferometer LISA. For this transition, I find constraints for the relevant para…
Electroweak Phase Transition, Gravitational Waves and Collider Probes in Multi-Scalar Dark Matter Scenarios
Central China Normal University（华中师范大学）；Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur（坎普尔印度理工学院）；Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati（古瓦哈提印度理工学院）；National Astronomical Observatory of Japan（日本国立天文台）
We investigate the gravitation waves produced from QCD and electroweak phase transitions in the early universe by using a 5-dimension holographic QCD model and a holographic technicolor model. The dynamical holographic QCD model is to describe the pure gluon system, where a first order confinement-deconfinement phase transition can happen at the critical temperature around 250 ${\rm MeV}$. The minimal holographic technicolor model is introduced to model the strong dynamics of electroweak, it can give a first order electroweak phase transition at the critical temperature around 100-360 ${\rm Ge…
We study the evolution of random hypermagnetic fields (HMFs) in the symmetric phase of the early universe before the electroweak phase transition. The behavior of HMFs is driven by the analog of the chiral magnetic effect accounting for the asymmetries of leptons and Higgs bosons. These asymmetries are also dynamical variables of the model and evolve together with HMFs. Moreover, we account for the contribution of the hyper-MHD turbulence in the effective diffusion coefficient and the $α$-dynamo parameter. The realistic spectrum of seed HMFs consists of two branches: Batchelor and Kolmogorov o…
We consider an extension of the standard model (SM) with charged singlet scalars and right handed (RH) neutrinos all at the electroweak scale. In this model, the neutrino masses are generated at three loops, which provide an explanation for their smallness, and the lightest RH neutrino, $N_{1}$, is a dark matter candidate. We find that for three generations of RH neutrinos, the model can be consistent with the neutrino oscillation data, lepton flavor violating processes, $N_{1}$ can have a relic density in agreement with the recent Planck data, and the electroweak phase transition can be stron…
We perform a global fit of the extended scalar singlet model with a fermionic dark matter (DM) candidate. Using the most up-to-date results from the $\mathit{Planck}$ measured DM relic density, direct detection limits from the XENON1T (2018) experiment, electroweak precision observables and Higgs searches at colliders, we constrain the 7-dimensional model parameter space. We also find regions in the model parameter space where a successful electroweak baryogenesis (EWBG) can be viable. This allows us to compute the gravitational wave (GW) signals arising from the phase transition, and discuss …
We reconsider the strength of the electroweak phase transition (EWPT) in the inert doublet dark matter model, using a quantitatively accurate form for the one-loop finite temperature effective potential, taking into account relevant particle physics and dark matter constraints, focusing on a standard model Higgs mass near 126 GeV, and doing a full scan of the space of otherwise unconstrained couplings. We find that there is a significant (although fine-tuned) space of parameters for achieving an EWPT sufficiently strong for baryogenesis while satisfying the Xenon100 constraints from direct det…
In an extension to the scale invariant standard model by two real singlet scalars $s$ and $s'$ in addition to the Higgs field, we investigate the strong first-order electroweak phase transition as a requirement for baryogenesis. This is the minimal extension to the scale invariant standard model with two extra degrees of freedom that possesses the physical Higgs mass of $125$ GeV. The scalar $s'$ being stable because of the $\mathbb Z_2$ discrete symmetry is taken as the dark matter candidate. We then show that the electroweak phase transition is strongly first-order, the dark matter relic den…
We study the strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition in the Inert Doublet Model (IDM), where particle dark matter (DM) is comprised of the lightest neutral inert Higgs boson. We improve over previous studies in the description and treatment of the finite-temperature effective potential and of the electroweak phase transition. We focus on a set of benchmark models inspired by the key mechanisms in the IDM leading to a viable dark matter particle candidate, and illustrate how to enhance the strength of the electroweak phase transition by adjusting the masses of the yet undiscovere…
With the assistance of a complex singlet, and an effective operator involving CP violations, the dark matter relic abundance and baryon asymmetry of the universe have been addressed simul- taneously. We studied the electroweak baryogenesis mechanism systematically. The electroweak phase transition analysis indicates that the strong first order phase transition takes place by one- step or two-step type due to the dynamics of the energy gap between the electroweak vacuum and the vacuum of the complex singlet. The relation between the magnitude of baryon asymmetry of the universe and the phase tr…
We analyze the stability of the vacuum and the electroweak phase transition in the NMSSM close to the Peccei-Quinn symmetry limit. This limit contains light Dark Matter (DM) particles with a mass significantly smaller than the weak scale and also light CP-even and CP-odd Higgs bosons. Such light particles lead to a consistent relic density and facilitate a large spin-independent direct DM detection cross section, that may accommodate the recently reported signatures at the DAMA and CoGeNT experiments. Studying the one-loop effective potential at finite temperature, we show that when the lighte…
We investigate an extension of the Standard Model (SM) with two candidates for dark matter (DM). One of them is a real scalar field and the other is an Abelian gauge field. Except for these two, there is another beyond SM field which has unit charge under a dark $ U_{D}(1) $ gauge symmetry. The model is classically scale invariant and the electroweak symmetry breaks because of the loop effects. Although SM is extended with a new dark symmetry and three fields, because of scale invariance, the parameter space is strictly restricted compared to other two-component DM models. We study both DM phe…
