7 research outputs found
The blackness of the cosmic microwave background spectrum as a probe of the distance-duality relation
A violation of the reciprocity relation, which induces a violation of the
distance duality relation, reflects itself in a change in the normalisation of
the cosmic microwave spectrum in such a way that its spectrum is grey. We show
that existing observational constraints imply that the reciprocity relation
cannot be violated by more than 0.01% between decoupling and today. We compare
this effect to other sources of violation of the distance duality relations
which induce spectral distortion of the cosmic microwave background spectrum.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, references added, minor typos correcte
Dark energy, the electroweak vacua and collider phenomenology
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.Comment: Expanded version. Published in Phys. Rev.