Holography and the Electroweak Phase Transition

We study through holography the compact Randall-Sundrum (RS) model at finite temperature. In the presence of radius stabilization, the system is described at low enough temperature by the RS solution. At high temperature it is described by the AdS-Schwarzshild solution with an event horizon replacing the TeV brane. We calculate the transition temperature T_c between the two phases and we find it to be somewhat smaller than the TeV scale. Assuming that the Universe starts out at T >> T_c and cools down by expansion, we study the rate of the transition to the RS phase. We find that the transition is too slow and the Universe ends up in an old inflation scenario unless tight bounds are satisfied by the model parameters. In particular we find that the AdS curvature must be comparable to the 5D Planck mass and that the radius stabilization mechanism must lead to a sizeable distortion of the basic RS metric.