Gravitational tests of electroweak relaxation

• Main Authors: Daniele Barducci, Enrico Bertuzzo, Martín Arteaga Tupia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SpringerOpen 2021-07-01
• Series: Journal of High Energy Physics
• Subjects: Beyond Standard Model; Cosmology of Theories beyond the SM; Higgs Physics
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP07(2021)119

Abstract We consider a scenario in which the electroweak scale is stabilized via the relaxion mechanism during inflation, focussing on the case in which the back-reaction potential is generated by the confinement of new strongly interacting vector-like fermions. If the reheating temperature is sufficiently high to cause the deconfinement of the new strong interactions, the back-reaction barrier then disappears and the Universe undergoes a second relaxation phase. This phase stops when the temperature drops sufficiently for the back-reaction to form again. We identify the regions of parameter space in which the second relaxation phase does not spoil the successful stabilization of the electroweak scale. In addition, the generation of the back-reaction potential that ends the second relaxation phase can be associated to a strong first order phase transition. We then study when such transition can generate a gravitational wave signal in the range of detectability of future interferometer experiments.