Holographic ideas are used to set-up cosmology along the Wilsonian paradigm. Cosmological solutions are investigated, and the connection between de Sitter and Anti de Sitter regimes in the supergravity landscape is probed.
If the electroweak sector of the Standard Model is described by classically conformal dynamics, the early Universe evolution can be substantially altered. In particular, one generically has a significant period of super-cooling, often ended when quark condensates form at the QCD phase transition. This scenario is potentially rich in cosmological consequences, such as renewed possibilities...
I discuss a class of effective low-energy theories that incorporate nonlinearly realised scale invariance through the dilaton field. Radiatively stable mass hierarchies are realised in a natural (without fine-tuning) way in this class of models, with a generic prediction of a light dilaton field. The cosmological electroweak phase transition in this scenario is triggered by the QCD phase...
I will review metric-affine theories of gravity and the occurrence of a Higgs mechanism that gives mass to the gravitational connection. I will then discuss the possibility of achieving quantum scale invariance at high energy in such theories.
It was recently proposed that the electroweak hierarchy problem is absent if the generation of the Higgs potential stems exclusively from quantum effects of heavy right-handed neutrinos which can also generate active neutrino masses via the type-I seesaw mechanism. Hence, in this framework dubbed the "neutrino option", the tree-level scalar potential is assumed to vanish at high energies. Such...
