Searching for Phase Transitions in the Early Universe

We now have a precise description of the universe's history from the first second onward - the Big Bang. The cosmological model is so accurate we can now use it to test physical laws at still earlier times, at energy scales far beyond those of even the largest particle accelerators.

This project will look closely at how the electroweak phase transition, when the Higgs field ``turned on'', leaves behind gravitational waves, how those signals will register in upcoming gravitational wave detectors, and how to extract information about electroweak physics from the gravitational waves at LISA, the space-based laser interferometer for gravitational wave detection recently approved by the European Space Agency.

The project will also look further beyond the Standard Model, at a common relic of gauge symmetry breaking: cosmic strings. It will study their emission of high energy particles with massively parallel computer simulations, and search for then in the latest data from gamma-ray and high energy neutrino detectors.
The project will be led by Professor Mark Hindmarsh, jointly of the Universities of Helsinki and Sussex, who will put together a team linking two leading departments working at the interface of particle physics and cosmology.