Conformal Cosmology and Physics at Gravitational and Electroweak Scales

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:12050077,
            doi = {10.48660/12050077},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/12050077},
            author = {Bars, Itzhak},
            keywords = {Cosmology},
            language = {en},
            title = {Conformal Cosmology and Physics at Gravitational and Electroweak Scales},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2012},
            month = {may},
            note = {PIRSA:12050077 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
          

Abstract

New techniques for obtaining the complete set of analytic solutions of the usual cosmological equations continue to shed new light on various aspects of cosmology. This approach, which was developed with a locally Weyl invariant formulation of gravity in 3+1 dimensions, was inspired by the 2T-physics formulation of all physics in 4+2 dimensions. I will first give a review of the general aspects of the analytic cosmological solutions, including recent work with Shi-Hung Chen, Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok, on geodesic completeness through the singularity and the nature of the Big Crunch/Big Bang transition. Then I will include the full Standard Model, and discuss how the instability of the Higgs potential and the conditions for the electroweak phase transition develop slowly during cosmological evolution of the universe, thus understanding that the electroweak phase transition is not "spontaneous" and the Standard Model is not decoupled from gravity or cosmology. This scenario, which is currently being developed further, is the natural cosmological consequence of coupling the Standard Model to Gravity by imposing Weyl symmetry, a feature that is required if 2T-physics in 4+2 dimensions is considered as the starting point. There are no dimensionful parameters, not even the Newton constant. Emergent dimensionful scales are dynamical during the evolution of the universe.