The electroweak horizon problem

Spontaneously broken symmetries in particle physics may have produced several phase transitions in cosmology, e.g., at the GUT energy scale (similar to 1015 GeV), resulting in a quasi-de Sitter inflationary expansion, solving the background temperature horizon problem. This transition would have occurred at t similar to 10-36 - -10-33 s, leading to a separation of the strong and electroweak forces. The discovery of the Higgs boson confirms that the Universe must have undergone another phase transition at the electroweak (EWPT) scale 159.5 +/- 1.5 GeV, about 10-11 seconds later, when fermions and the W +/- and Z0 bosons gained mass, leading to the separation of the electric and weak forces. But today the vacuum expectation value (vev) of the Higgs field appears to be uniform throughout the visible Universe, a region much larger than causally-connected volumes at the EWPT. The discovery of the Higgs boson thus creates another serious horizon problem for Lambda CDM, for which there is currently no established theoretical resolution. The EWPT was a smooth crossover, however, so previously disconnected electroweak vacuua might have homogenized as they gradually came into causal contact. But using the known Higgs potential and vev, we estimate that this process would have taken longer than the age of the Universe, so it probably could not have mitigated the emergence of different standard model parameters across the sky. The EWPT horizon problem thus argues against the expansion history of the early Universe predicted by standard cosmology.(c) 2022 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Spontaneously broken symmetries in particle physics may have resulted in phase transitions in cosmology, such as quasi-de Sitter inflationary expansion and the separation of forces at the GUT energy scale. The discovery of the Higgs boson confirms another phase transition at the electroweak scale, but it also presents a horizon problem for current cosmology. The horizon problem suggests that the early Universe's expansion history predicted by standard cosmology may be contradicting.