Electroweak Symmetry Non-Restoration from Dark Matter

Abstract

Restoration of the electroweak symmetry at temperatures around the Higgs mass is linked to tight phenomenological constraints on many baryogenesis scenarios. A potential remedy can be found in mechanisms of electroweak symmetry non-restoration (SNR), in which symmetry breaking is extended to higher temperatures due to new states with couplings to the Standard Model. Here we show that, in the presence of a second Higgs doublet, SNR can be realized with only a handful of new fermions which can be identified as viable dark matter candidates consistent with all current observational constraints. The competing requirements on this class of models allow for SNR at temperatures up to ∼TeV, and imply the presence of sub-TeV new physics with sizable interactions with the Standard Model. As a result this scenario is highly testable with signals in reach of next-generation collider and dark matter direct detection experiments.

First Order Color Symmetry Breaking and Restoration Triggered by Electroweak Symmetry Non-restoration

“…where V SNR is the effective potential for the EWSNR, whose expression depends on the model setup and can be found in Refs. [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Negative quartic coupling −λ hc contributes to a negative thermal mass of the SM Higgs as required by the EWSNR, and the same coupling contributes a negative squared mass to the color triplet after electroweak symmetry breaking, which may lead to the spontaneous breaking and restoration of the color symmetry through interfering with the µ 2 c .…”

“…In SNR, the vacuum expectation value (VEV) of the SM Higgs doublet can evolve to a value much larger than 246 GeV, and further up to a cut-off scale Λ, above which additional Higgs interactions may restore the electroweak symmetry. Actually, investigation of SNR has a long history [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] and recent studies [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] show that this scenario contains rich phenomenologies deserving dedicated studies.…”