Dark energy, the electroweak vacua and collider phenomenology

Abstract

Higher dimensional non-renormalizable operators may modify the Standard Model Higgs potential in many interesting ways. Here, we consider the appearance of a second vacuum which may play an important role in cosmology. For the certain range of parameters, the usual second order electroweak phase transition is followed by a first order phase transition that may drive the late time accelerated expansion of the universe. Such a potential contains kink-like solutions which in turn can play a crucial role in reconstructing the global shape of the potential in colliders, as we explicitly demonstrate.

Expanded version. Published in Phys. Rev. D