TY  - JOUR
AU  - Bordes, J.
AU  - Chan, H. M.
AU  - Tsou, S. T.
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023//
TI  - A vacuum transition in the FSM with a possible new take on the horizon problem in cosmology
T2  - Int. J. Mod. Phys. A
JO  - International Journal of Modern Physics A
SP  - 2350124
EP  - 32pp
VL  - 38
IS  - 25
PB  - World Scientific Publ Co Pte Ltd
KW  - Framed standard model
KW  - phase transition
KW  - early Universe
KW  - cosmology
AB  - The framed standard model (FSM), constructed to explain the empirical mass and mixing patterns (including CP phases) of quarks and leptons, in which it has done quite well, gives otherwise the same result as the standard model (SM) in almost all areas in particle physics where the SM has been successfully applied, except for a few specified deviations such as the W mass and the g-2 of muons, that is, just where experiment is showing departures from what SM predicts. It predicts further the existence of a hidden sector of particles some of which may function as dark matter. In this paper, we first note that the above results involve, surprisingly, the FSM undergoing a vacuum transition (VTR1) at a scale of around 17MeV, where the vacuum expectation values of the colour framons (framed vectors promoted into fields) which are all nonzero above that scale acquire some vanishing components below it. This implies that the metric pertaining to these vanishing components would vanish also. Important consequences should then ensue, but these occur mostly in the unknown hidden sector where empirical confirmation is hard at present to come by, but they give small reflections in the standard sector, some of which may have already been seen. However, one notes that if, going off at a tangent, one imagines colour to be embedded, Kaluza-Klein (KK) fashion, into a higher-dimensional space-time, then this VTR1 would cause 2 of the compactified dimensions to collapse. This might mean then that when the universe cooled to the corresponding temperature of 1011 K when it was about 10-3 s old, this VTR1 collapse would cause the three spatial dimensions of the universe to expand to compensate. The resultant expansion is estimated, using FSM parameters previously determined from particle physics, to be capable, when extrapolated backwards in time, of bringing the present universe back inside the then horizon, solving thus formally the horizon problem. Besides, VTR1 being a global phenomenon in the FSM, it would switch on and off automatically and simultaneously over all space, thus requiring seemingly no additional strategy for a graceful exit. However, this scenario has not been checked for consistency with other properties of the universe and is to be taken thus not as a candidate solution of the horizon problem but only as an observation from particle physics which might be of interest to cosmologists and experts in the early universe. For particle physicists also, it might serve as an indicator for how relevant this VTR1 can be, even if the KK assumption is not made.
SN  - 0217-751x
UR  - https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.10028
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1142/S0217751X23501245
DO  - 10.1142/S0217751X23501245
LA  - English
N1  - WOS:001099552500002
ID  - Bordes_etal2023
ER  -