Title: Exploring the Cosmological Frontier with High Energy Colliders
Abstract: By probing high energies and tiny distances, colliders like the LHC give us access to conditions that were last prevalent in the very early universe. Studies of the Higgs boson may allow us to discern the nature of the electroweak phase transition, which depends on the detailed shape of the Higgs potential away from our vacuum, as well as the possible existence of new, as yet undiscovered particles. This could answer the long-standing question of whether the electroweak phase transition is responsible for creating the matter-antimattter asymmetry of our universe. I will show how collider searches shed light on these questions and demonstrate the explicit connections between experiments today and conditions in the early universe. Significant progress has already been made at the LHC, but exhaustively probing the electroweak phase transition will require proposed future colliders, especially a possible 100 TeV pp machine that may be built by either CERN or China in the coming decades.