Cosmic Foam: How Vacuum Bubbles Created Matter ⚡ экспресс
The structure and phenomenology of ultrarelativistic collisions of Higgs vacuum bubbles during a first-order phase transition associated with the Standard Model Higgs field in the early Universe are examined. Such collisions act as a cosmic Higgs collider, providing access to energy scales up to the Planck level, allowing exploration of new physics that interacts with the Higgs boson. The possibility of non-thermal production of superheavy dark matter via the Higgs portal with masses up to 10^16 GeV is demonstrated, with direct and indirect detection signals observable for masses around 10 TeV. Leptogenesis through the production of right-handed neutrinos at the Grand Unification scale is also possible.
Fresh after the Big Bang, the Universe fizzed like a freshly poured soda. All of space was filled with bubbles—regions of new vacuum, the kind governed by the Standard Model, pushing out the old unstable state. The walls of these bubbles accelerated to near light speed, and in head-on collisions they crumpled and burst, unleashing monstrous energy.
These collisions acted as a colossal natural accelerator: at the point of impact, particles of unimaginable mass were born. Among them were candidates for dark matter and hypothetical right-handed neutrinos. The latter, as they decayed, produced a microscopic excess of matter over antimatter—the very imbalance from which galaxies, stars, and we ourselves later formed. This was the one and only time nature switched on such a powerful collider; those conditions never repeated, but we see the results today in the form of galaxies and dark matter.
🎯 Some of the particles born could weigh as much as a grain of salt—an absolute record in the world of elementary particles, since an ordinary proton is billions of billions of times lighter.
🎬 In science fiction, vacuum decay usually appears as a cosmic catastrophe—for example, in Stephen Baxter's novel 'Vacuum Diagrams'. Yet in reality, it is precisely this process that may have given birth to everything that exists.