Talks

  9:30 am             -              Neil Turok, Director, Perimeter Institute

10:30 am             -              Jennifer Yuen, Counselling Services, UW

11:00 am             -              Michael Duschenes, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer

11:20 am             -              Break

11:30 am             -              Sheri Keffer and Patti Butler, People and Culture

11:45 am             -              Dan Lynch, Bistro

12:00 pm             -              Dawn Bombay, Library

12:15 pm             -              Chou Khamkeuang and Joy Montgomery, IT

12:30 pm             -              Lunch

 2:00 pm              -              James Forrest, Director, Perimeter Scholars International

 2:15 pm              -              Ice Breaking Session

Extensions of the Standard Model (SM) Higgs sector often predict the existence of new vacua and can feature novel patterns of symmetry breaking in the early universe. In this talk, I will discuss the implications of such scenarios for electroweak scale cosmology, baryogenesis, and Higgs phenomenology. I will focus on two classes of models, one involving a gauge singlet scalar field and the other an inert SU(2) doublet scalar. The former can give rise to a strong first-order electroweak phase transition, but also to rapidly expanding bubbles which can pose a problem for viable electroweak baryogenesis. In the latter, electroweak symmetry can be spontaneously broken by a first-order phase transition to an exotic vacuum, allowing for successful electroweak baryogenesis decoupled from the Standard Model-like Higgs field. Nevertheless, this class of scenarios generically predicts modifications of the SM-like Higgs couplings within reach of present-day collider experiments.