The main purpose of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is to understand the fundamental building blocks of nature. These results will help unveil the origin and evolution of our Universe.

The ambition of this Research Topic is therefore to bring to light the latest exciting ideas and results that are meant to elucidate the relation between the LHC collider program and astrophysics, paying attention to their impact on cosmology.

The discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC has crowned the Standard Model (SM) of particle interactions as one of the most successful descriptions of nature. We can now extrapolate the SM up to the Planck scale, providing further tests that are complementary to those performed at the Fermi scale. We encourage contributions to describe this active research topic.

Additionally, this groundbreaking advancement offers also the possibility to retire or revisit old paradigms while it begs for new ideas and directions that are much needed to guide future experimental endeavors. In fact, we expect model building to continue playing a central role in bridging the gap between the Fermi scale and the Planck one, where traditional gravity becomes strong. The reasons being that the SM fails to account for neutrino oscillations, dark matter, baryon asymmetry, etc. We therefore need to replace the SM with highly motivated extensions. We welcome contributions that will illustrate and summarize the new main directions in model building and and their impact on gravity and cosmology.

These subjects are intimately related to the physical interpretation and internal consistency of quantum field theories (QFT) at all scales. Following Wilson, theories that are well defined at arbitrary short distances are truly fundamental. We encourage therefore contributions that investigate also the impact on particle physics and cosmology of extensions of the SM featuring fundamental (as opposed to effective) QFTs.

To conclude, this Research Topic aims at providing a bird’s eye view on the fascinating interplay between the Fermi scale and the physics and history of our cosmos. It is open both to review and original works in a way to provide an up-to-date state-of-the-art of this exciting branch of physics.

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Frontiers in Astronomy and Space Sciences

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