Title: The Violent Cosmic History of the Higgs

Speaker: Prof. Mustafa Amin, Rice University

Abstract: The discovery of the standard model Higgs without hints of any other new particles at the LHC points a potentially fine-tuned Higgs potential. In this seminar, I will argue that this fine-tuning, when determined by couplings to other fields, hints at a violent history of the Higgs field in the early universe. Before settling into the electroweak symmetry(EW) breaking global minimum, we find that the Higgs field naturally undergoes a violent, spatially inhomogenoues and nonlinear evolution. This violent evolution leads to (i) the generation of a potentially observable stochastic gravitational wave background, (ii) changes the equation of the state of our nascent universe which can influence inflationary constraints from the cosmic microwave background. Through this work, we establish a novel connection between Higgs/EW fine tuning and non-trivial cosmological signals.

If time permits, I will also discuss (somewhat tangentially) the formation of some fascinating non-topological solitonic objects called oscillons within this context (oscillons also appear during reheating after inflation, axionic dark matter and Bose-Einstein condensates).