No Arabic abstract
The mass hierarchy among the three generations of quarks and charged leptons is one of the greatest mysteries in particle physics. In various flavor models, the origin of this phenomenon is attributed to a series of hierarchical spontaneous symmetry breakings, most of which are beyond the reach of particle colliders. We point out that the observation of a multi-peaked stochastic gravitational wave signal from a series of cosmological phase transitions could well be a unique probe of the mechanism behind flavor hierarchies. To illustrate this point, we show how near future ground- and space-based gravitational wave observatories could detect up to three peaks in the recently proposed $PS^3$ model.
The recent electron recoil excess observed by XENON1T has a possible interpretation in terms of solar axions coupled to electrons. If such axions are still relativistic at recombination they would also leave a cosmic imprint in the form of an additional radiation component, parameterized by an effective neutrino number $Delta N_text{eff}$. We explore minimal scenarios with a detectable signal in future CMB surveys: axions coupled democratically to all fermions, axion-electron coupling generated radiatively, the DFSZ framework for the QCD axion. The predicted $Delta N_text{eff}$ is larger than $0.03-0.04$ for all cases, close to the $2sigma$ forecasted sensitivity of CMB-S4 experiments. This opens the possibility of testing with cosmological observations the solar axion interpretation of the XENON1T excess.
Gravitational shockwaves are simple exact solutions of Einstein equations representing the fields of ultrarelativistic sources and idealized gravitational waves (shocks). Historically, much work has focused on shockwaves in the context of possible black hole formation in high energy particle collisions, yet they remain at the forefront of research even today. Representing hard modes in the bulk, shocks give rise to the gravitational memory effect at the classical level and implant supertranslation (BMS) hair onto a classical spacetime at the quantum level. The aim of this paper is to further our understanding of the `information content of such supertranslations. Namely, we show that, contrary to the several claims in the literature, a gravitational shockwave does leave a quantum imprint on the vacuum state of a test quantum field and that this imprint is accessible to local observers carrying Unruh--DeWitt (UDW) detectors in this spacetime.
The clockwork mechanism, which can naturally explain the origin of small numbers, is implemented in $SO(10)$ grand unified theories to address the origin of hierarchies in fermion masses and mixings. We show that a minimal Yukawa sector involving a $10_H$ and $overline{126}_H$ of Higgs bosons, extended with two clockwork chains consisting of $16+overline{16}$ vector-like fermions, can explain the hierarchical patterns with all the Yukawa couplings being of order one. Emergence of a realistic mass spectrum does not require any symmetry that distinguishes the three generations. We develop clockwork-extended $SO(10)$ GUTs both in the context of SUSY and non-SUSY frameworks. Implementation of the mechanism in non-SUSY scenario assumes a Peccei-Quinn symmetry realized at an intermediate scale, with the clockwork sector carrying non-trivial charges, which solves the strong CP problem and provides axion as a dark matter candidate.
We study the stochastic background of gravitational waves which accompany the sudden freeze-out of dark matter triggered by a cosmological first order phase transition that endows dark matter with mass. We consider models that produce the measured dark matter relic abundance via (1) bubble filtering, and (2) inflation and reheating, and show that gravitational waves from these mechanisms are detectable at future interferometers.
We discuss the cosmology of models in which the standard model Yukawa couplings depend on scalar field(s), often referred to as flavons. We find that thermal corrections of the flavon potential tend to decrease the Yukawa couplings, providing an important input to model-building. Working in the specific framework of Froggatt-Nielsen models, we compute the abundance of flavons in the early universe generated both via freeze-in and from coherent oscillations induced by thermal corrections to their potential, and discuss constraints on flavon models from cosmology. We find that cosmology places important constraints on theories containing flavons even for regions of parameter space inaccessible to collider searches.