Gravitational waves

The detection of gravitational waves (GWs) originating from a black hole (BH) binary merger in 2015 by LIGO marked the beginning of the age of GW astronomy. Another defining moment came in 2017 with the joint detection of GWs and their electromagnetic (EM) counterpart, beginning…

The existence of cosmic strings was proposed in the mid-seventies as a by-product of the various phase transitions that occured in the early Universe. Cosmic strings are one-dimensional topological defects; structures of extremely high energy density with infinitesimal widths an…

While Big Bang cosmology successfully explains much of the history of our Universe, there are certain features it does not explain, for example the spatial flatness and uniformity of our Universe. One widely studied explanation for these features is cosmological inflation. The o…

The thermal history of the Higgs boson and its connection with electroweak symmetry breaking play an important role in the production of cosmological relics. In this thesis, I study different patterns of the electroweak symmetry at finite temperatures to build a bridge connectin…