We consider an alternative mechanism for the production of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. It is basically due to vacuum pair creation (VPC) of vector bosons (W and Z) as a consequence of a rapid W and Z mass generation during the electroweak phase transition in the early Universe. The mechanism is as follows: after their pair crreation, the vector bosons may either annihilate directly into photons or decay into leptons and quarks which subsequently annihilate as lepton-antilepton and quark-antiquark pairs into photons. Preliminary estimates show that the number of CMB photons obtained this way can be sufficient to explain the presently observed CMB photon density. In this contribution we present an exactly soluble model for vacuum pair creation kinetics.
The evolution of the Universe is the ultimate laboratory to study fundamental physics across energy scales that span about 25 orders of magnitude: from the grand unification scale through particle and nuclear physics scales down to the scale of atomic physics. The standard models of cosmology and particle physics provide the basic understanding of the early and present Universe and predict a series of phase transitions that occurred in succession during the expansion and cooling history of the Universe. We survey these phase transitions, highlighting the equilibrium and non-equilibrium effects as well as their observational and cosmological consequences. We discuss the current theoretical and experimental programs to study phase transitions in QCD and nuclear matter in accelerators along with the new results on novel states of matter as well as on multi- fragmentation in nuclear matter. A critical assessment of similarities and differences between the conditions in the early universe and those in ultra- relativistic heavy ion collisions is presented. Cosmological observations and accelerator experiments are converging towards an unprecedented understanding of the early and present Universe.
We construct an $SU(2)_Ltimes SU(2)_Rtimes U(1)_{B-L}$ model with a Higgs sector that consists of a bidoublet and a doublet, and with a right-handed neutrino sector that includes one Dirac fermion and one Majorana fermion. This model explains the Run 1 CMS and ATLAS excess events in the $e^+e^-jj$, $jj$, $Wh^0$ and $WZ$ channels in terms of a $W$ boson of mass near 1.9 TeV and of coupling $g_R$ in the 0.4--0.5 range, with the lower half preferred by limits on $t bar b$ resonances and Run 2 results. The production cross section of this $W$ boson at the 13 TeV LHC is in the 700--900 fb range, allowing sensitivity in more than 17 final states. We determine that the $Z$ boson has a mass in the 3.4--4.5 TeV range and several decay channels that can be probed in Run 2 of the LHC, including cascade decays via heavy Higgs bosons.
We study the dynamics of a timelike vector field which violates Lorentz invariance when the background spacetime is in an accelerating phase in the early universe. It is shown that a timelike vector field is difficult to realize an inflationary phase, so we investigate the evolution of a vector field within a scalar field driven inflation model. And we calculate the power spectrum of the vector field without considering the metric perturbations. While the time component of the vector field perturbations provides a scale invariant spectrum when $xi = 0$, where $xi$ is a nonminimal coupling parameter, both the longitudinal and transverse perturbations give a scale invariant spectrum when $xi = 1/6$.
We study the induced primordial gravitational waves (GW) coming from the effect of scalar perturbation on the tensor perturbation at the second order of cosmological perturbation theory. We use the evolution of the standard model degrees of freedom with respect to temperature in the early Universe to compute the induced gravitational waves bakcground. Our result shows that the spectrum of the induced GW is affected differently by the standard model degrees of freedom than the GW coming from first order tensor perturbation. This phenomenon is due to the presence of scalar perturbations as a source for tensor perturbations and it is effective around the quark gluon deconfinement and electroweak transition. In case of considering a scalar spectral index larger than one at small scales or a non-Gaussian curvature power spectrum this effect can be observed by gravitational wave observatories.
Recent measurements of the $W$-boson charge asymmetry and of the $Z$-boson production cross sections, performed at the Tevatron collider in Run II by the D0 and CDF collaborations, are studied using the HERAFitter framework to assess their impact on the proton parton distribution functions (PDFs). The Tevatron measurements, together with deep-inelastic scattering data from HERA, are included in a QCD analysis performed at next-to-leading order, and compared to the predictions obtained using other PDF sets from different groups. Good agreement between measurements and theoretical predictions is observed. The Tevatron data provide significant constraints on the $d$-valence quark distribution.