High Energy Physics Seminars

Vacuum decay through a first order phase transition (FOPT) is a realistic possibility in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics and one of the most attractive sources of primordial gravitational waves for a variety of current and upcoming experiments. In FOPTs with so-called runaway behavior, the walls of bubbles of true vacuum can reach energies far higher than the scale of symmetry breaking and possibly any temperature ever reached in our cosmic history. The collisions of these bubble walls can then produce ultra-high-energy or ultraheavy particles. This talk will cover recent developments and challenges in the formalism for calculating particle production in such frameworks, as well as applications to solve some of the fundamental problems in particle physics: the production of dark matter and the baryon asymmetry of the Universe.