Abstract
As experiment charts new territory at the electroweak scale, the enterprise to characterise all possible theories becomes all the more necessary. In the absence of new particles, this ambitious enterprise is attainable and has led to the Higgs Effective Field Theory (HEFT) as the most general characterising framework, containing the Standard Model Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) as a subspace. The characterisation of this theory space led to the dichotomy SMEFT vs. HEFT SMEFT as the two possible realisations of symmetry breaking. The criterion to distinguish these two possibilities is non-local in field space, and phenomena which explore field space beyond the neighbourhood of the vacuum manifold are in a singular position to tell them apart. Cosmology allows for such phenomena, and this work focuses on HEFT SMEFT, the less explored of the two options, to find that first order phase transitions with detectable gravitational wave remnants, domain wall formation and vacuum decay in the far, far distant future can take place and single out HEFT SMEFT. Results in cosmology are put against LHC constraints, and the potential of future ground- and space-based experiments to cover parameter space is discussed.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Djuna Croon, Philipp Schicho and Dave Sutherland for helpful comments. R.A., R.H. and M.W. are supported by the STFC under Grant No. ST/T001011/1. J.C.C. is supported by grant RYC2021-030842-I funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR, and grant PID2022-139466NB-C22 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by ERDF A way of making Europe.
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Alonso, R., Criado, J., Houtz, R. et al. Walls, bubbles and doom — the cosmology of HEFT. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 49 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)049
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP05(2024)049