The signals of doomsday II: Cosmological signatures of late time $SU(3)_c$ symmetry breaking

Abstract

The only two gauge symmetries which remain unbroken today are $SU(3)_c$ and $U(1)_{EM}$. Both of them are crucial for our universe to appear the way it does, and for our form of life to exist. Unless we are very special observers living at the very end of the cosmological symmetry breaking chain, there is no reason to believe that these two symmetries will remain unbroken in the future. In this paper, we discuss cosmological observational signatures of the $SU(3)_c$ symmetry breaking. We introduce a model with a new colored scalar field whose potential supports the first order phase transition through creation of the true vacuum bubbles. We then calculate particle production due to vacuum mismatch and use the event generators to study the decays of the new scalar field and massive gluons. We then use Pythia to hadronize the decay products and get the distributions of produced photons and neutrinos as the final result. They represent a long range signature which, if ever observed, might be interpreted as the signals of the doomsday.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: Characteristic potential for a first order phase transition. There exist the false vacuum where the symmetry is unbroken, $\psi =0$, and the true vacuum where the symmetry is broken, $\psi \neq 0$. $\delta V$ is the difference in energy densities between the vacua. $V_0$ plays the role of the cosmological constant, and can be set to zero.
• Figure 2: On the left we have number density $N_k$ of the scalar colored particles and on the right we have number density $N_k$ of the massive gluons created as a function of their momenta due to the vacuum mismatch
• Figure 3: Differential energy spectrum of photons per 2.5 TeV color octet decay.
• Figure 4: Differential energy spectrum of neutrinos per 2.5 TeV color octet decay.
• Figure 5: Differential energy spectrum of photons per 1 TeV massive gluon decay.