Phase transitions in strongly coupled extensions of the Standard Model

After the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012 at LHC, understanding the origin of
the electroweak scale remains a prime goal of particle physics. Having the Higgs as
a bound state of some strongly coupled new dynamics is an attractive possibility,
which has given risen to a great deal of theoretical work in the last 10 years and is
also actively looked for experimentally. This goes particularly under the name of
"composite Higgs".
It is quite possible that the confinement-deconfinement process in such a theory
goes via a first order phase transition when the universe cooles down. Such a
transition would happen at the TeV scale, and could generate a stochastic
background of gravitational waves, which can by searched for with space based
gravitational wave interferometers, such as LISA (to be launched in the 2030ies).
The project will study phase transitions composite Higgs-like setups by using the
technique of holography, where the 4D strongly coupled model is described by a 5D
theory including gravity. The aim will be to understand the main thermodynamics
quantities of such transitions, such as latent heat, bubble wall properties and the
nucleation rate. This will be sufficient to predict the gravitational wave signal of such
a model. In parallel we will aim to crosslink the phase transition to LHC studies.