Phase transitions in strongly coupled extensions of the Standard Model

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After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at LHC, understanding the origin ofthe electroweak scale remains a prime goal of particle physics. Having the Higgs asa bound state of some strongly coupled new dynamics is an attractive possibility,which has given risen to a great deal of theoretical work in the last 10 years and isalso actively looked for experimentally. This goes particularly under the name of"composite Higgs".It is quite possible that the confinement-deconfinement process in such a theorygoes via a first order phase transition when the universe cooles down. Such atransition would happen at the TeV scale, and could generate a stochasticbackground of gravitational waves, which can by searched for with space basedgravitational wave interferometers, such as LISA (to be launched in the 2030ies).The project will study phase transitions composite Higgs-like setups by using thetechnique of holography, where the 4D strongly coupled model is described by a 5Dtheory including gravity. The aim will be to understand the main thermodynamicsquantities of such transitions, such as latent heat, bubble wall properties and thenucleation rate. This will be sufficient to predict the gravitational wave signal of sucha model. In parallel we will aim to crosslink the phase transition to LHC studies.