PSILOGO

Laboratory for Particle Physics (LTP)


LTP Colloquium

The electroweak phase transition and the origin of matter

Thursday, April 30, 2025, 16:00
WBGB/019

Thomas Biekötter, IFT Madrid

Abstract:
The observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe remains one of the deepest puzzles in fundamental physics. Electroweak baryogenesis offers an elegant solution, requiring new CP-violating interactions and a strong first-order electroweak phase transition, both of which leave measurable imprints across a range of experiments. Extended Higgs sectors play a central role: they can simultaneously modify the nature of the electroweak phase transition, predict additional scalar particles searchable at the LHC and accommodate new sources of CP-violation. A strong electroweak phase transition moreover generates a stochastic primordial gravitational-wave background that is potentially within reach of space-based gravitational-wave detectors such as LISA. I will show how combining LHC Higgs data, EDM constraints, and gravitational-wave projections allows one to build realistic assessments of the viability of electroweak baryogenesis, and how the complementarity between these three experimental frontiers will be essential to determining whether the electroweak phase transition holds the key to the origin of matter.