Seminar: ‘A hot take on electroweak skyrmions’

Title: ‘A hot take on electroweak skyrmions’

Speaker: Luis Gil (Universidad de Granada).

Venue&Time: Red Room / 14:30

Abstract: Skyrmions are stable and topologically non-trivial field configurations that behave like localized particles. They appear in the chiral  effective theory for pions, where they correspond to the baryon states, and might also exist in the electroweak theory, in the presence of certain effective interactions.
In this talk, focusing on toy models that capture different limits of the electroweak sector of the Standard Model (SM), we will how skyrmions not classically stable at zero temperature can be stabilized by thermal effects. This motivates the study of skyrmions in the quantum effective action of the SM, where they might constitute a dark matter candidate without new physics.