Stepping into electroweak symmetry breaking: Phase transitions and Higgs phenomenology

We study the dynamics of electroweak symmetry breaking in an extension of the Standard Model where the Higgs sector is augmented by the addition of a real (Y = 0) isospin triplet. We show that this scenario exhibits a novel, two-step electroweak phase transition, wherein the first step provides the strongly first-order transition as required for electroweak baryogenesis, followed by a second step to the Standard Model Higgs phase that also admits a cold dark matter candidate. We analyze the constraints on this scenario from recent results obtained at the Large Hadron Collider for the Higgs diphoton decay channel. We argue that this two-step scenario can be generalized to extensions of the Standard Model with additional higher-dimensional scalar multiplets that may yield realistic baryogenesis dynamics.