A vacuum transition in the FSM with a possible new take on the horizon problem in cosmology

Abstract

The framed standard model (FSM), constructed to explain the empirical mass and mixing patterns of quarks and leptons, gives the same result as the standard model in almost all areas in particle physics where it has been successfully applied, except for a few deviations such as the W mass and the g-2 of muons, where experiment is showing departures from what SM predicts. It predicts further the existence of a hidden sector of particles which may function as dark matter. In this paper, we first note that the above results involve the FSM undergoing a vacuum transition at a scale of around 17 MeV, where the vev's of the colour framons 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. Consequences should then ensue, 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 one imagines colour to be embedded, Kaluza-Klein fashion, into a higher dimensional space-time, then this VTR1 would cause 2 of the compactified dimensions to collapse. This might mean that when the universe cooled to the corresponding temperature of $10^{11}$K when it was about $10^{-3}$s old, this VTR1 collapse would cause the 3 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 no additional strategy for a graceful exit.