Real time dynamics of the electroweak phase transition

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The recent discovery of the Higgs boson at LHC has added urgency to the question of electroweak symmetry breaking happened in the early universe. While in the standard model this symmetry breaking is a smooth crossover, in many extension of the SM this process happens via a first-order phase transition. In the latter case, bubble containing the current phase of the universe nucleate and expand, finally filling the entire universe. In the project the student will study possible remnants of this transitions, such as gravitational waves or the cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry. This will require to investigate in detail the properties of the bubbles, such as their propagation speed and the released latent heat. Results will be interfaced with existing computations for eg. the resulting gravitational wave spectrum to derive predictions for future observations. The models we will study include extension of the standard model Higgs sector with additional Higgs doublets and singlet and models where electroweak symmetry breaking is driven by strong dynamics at the TeV-scale.