Probing radiative electroweak symmetry breaking with colliders and gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper investigates radiative electroweak symmetry breaking, analyzing its potential to produce observable signals via colliders and gravitational waves, and explores the associated phase transitions and symmetry breaking scales.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive phenomenological analysis of the logarithmic potential in radiative symmetry breaking, including vacuum solutions, thermal history, and gravitational wave predictions.

Findings

Light scalar boson mixes with the Higgs and causes first-order phase transitions.

Future collider and gravitational wave experiments can probe symmetry breaking scales up to 10^8 GeV.

Analytical solutions for vacuum structure and scalar interactions are derived.

Abstract

Radiative symmetry breaking provides an appealing explanation for electroweak symmetry breaking and addresses the hierarchy problem. We present a comprehensive phenomenological study of this scenario, focusing on its key feature: the logarithmic-shaped potential. This potential gives rise to a relatively light scalar boson that mixes with the Higgs boson and leads to first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) in the early Universe. Our detailed analysis includes providing exact and analytical solutions for the vacuum structure and scalar interactions, classifying four patterns of cosmic thermal history, and calculating the supercooled FOPT dynamics and GWs. By combining future collider and gravitational wave experiments, we can probe the conformal symmetry breaking scales up to $10^5-10^8$ GeV.