11-14 September 2019
University of Warsaw
Europe/Warsaw timezone
Can dark matter drive electroweak symmetry breaking?
Presented by Dr. Catarina COSME
on
14 Sep 2019
from
09:30
to
09:45
Session:
Parallel 8
Content
We consider the possibility of an oscillating scalar field accounting for dark matter and dynamically controlling the spontaneous breaking of the electroweak symmetry through a Higgs-portal coupling. This requires a late decay of the inflaton field, such that thermal effects do not restore the electroweak symmetry after reheating, and so inflation is followed by an inflaton matter-dominated epoch. During inflation, the dark scalar field acquires a large expectation value due to a negative non-minimal coupling to curvature, thus stabilizing the Higgs field by holding it at the origin. After inflation, the dark scalar oscillates in a quartic potential, behaving as dark radiation, and only when its amplitude drops below a critical value does the Higgs field acquire a non-zero vacuum expectation value. The dark scalar then becomes massive and starts behaving as cold dark matter until the present day. We further show that consistent scenarios require dark scalar masses in the few GeV range, which may be probed with future collider experiments.
Place
Location: University of Warsaw
Address: Faculty of Physics
Pasteura Str. 5
02-093 Warsaw
Poland
Room: 0.06
Primary authors
- Dr. João G. ROSA University of Aveiro
- Dr. Catarina COSME Carleton University
- Prof. Orfeu BERTOLAMI University of Porto