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Cosmological vacuum selection in dynamical symmetry breaking at zero vacuum energy
Abstract
Coleman-Weinberg models invoke classical scale invariance to forbid scalar masses, but then add a dimensionful constant to cancel the vacuum energy of the broken vacuum. This inconsistency is avoided by special quantum potentials, whose symmetry-breaking vacuum is degenerate with the symmetric one. We compute which vacuum is selected by the thermal history of the universe. While a neutral thermal plasma favours the symmetric phase, a sufficiently large conserved charge asymmetry supports a rotating scalar condensate that evolves toward the broken vacuum as the universe cools, and survives fragmentation.
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BibTeX
@misc{duch2026cosmological,
title = {{Cosmological vacuum selection in dynamical symmetry breaking at zero vacuum energy}},
author = {Mateusz Duch and Alessandro Strumia},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.28729},
eprint = {2610.28729},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28729},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Cosmological vacuum selection in dynamical symmetry breaking at zero vacuum energy
AU - Mateusz Duch
AU - Alessandro Strumia
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/20
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.28729
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.28729
AB - Coleman-Weinberg models invoke classical scale invariance to forbid scalar masses, but then add a dimensionful constant to cancel the vacuum energy of the broken vacuum. This inconsistency is avoided by special quantum potentials, whose symmetry-breaking vacuum is degenerate with the symmetric one. We compute which vacuum is selected by the thermal history of the universe. While a neutral thermal plasma favours the symmetric phase, a sufficiently large conserved charge asymmetry supports a rotating scalar condensate that evolves toward the broken vacuum as the universe cools, and survives fragmentation.
ER -