Emergent Electroweak Gravity

by Dr Bob McElrath (CERN)

Thursday 6 Nov 2008, 11:00 → 12:00 Europe/Zurich

1/1-025 (CERN)

Part I: Discussion of recent papers Part II: Blackboard presentation by Bob McElrath: We show that any cosmological relic with small couplings to itself and baryons becomes a superfluid shortly after decoupling, due to the broadening of its wave packet, and lack of any elastic scattering. The dynamics of a superfluid are given by the excitation spectrum of bound state quasi-particles, rather than the center of mass motion of constituent particles. If this relic is a fermion with a repulsive interaction mediated by a heavy boson, such as the $Z^0$ with neutrinos or dark matter, a theory of gravity emerges spontaneously. In this theory the vierbein is a Goldstone boson associated with the spontaneous breaking of Lorentz invariance due to the presence of a physical background superfluid.