The electroweak phase transition should happen at ~160 GeV. In standard cosmology, the Higgs field settles into its broken-symmetry minimum as the universe cools through this scale. But in Cesca and Kobakhidze's scenario, it doesn't. The Higgs stays trapped in the symmetric phase — the field sitting at zero, electroweak symmetry unbroken — all the way down to ~28 MeV.
What finally triggers the transition is QCD. The strong force condenses quarks into a chiral condensate at its own phase transition temperature. This condensate couples to the Higgs through Yukawa interactions, generating an effective tadpole term that destabilizes the symmetric minimum. The strong force kicks the Higgs off its perch.
The mechanism requires a nearly flat Higgs potential — the quadratic term must be small enough that thermal corrections can maintain the symmetric phase far below the natural electroweak scale. This is a tuning, but it produces observable consequences: the delayed transition is strongly first-order, generating gravitational waves detectable by LISA, and it changes the timeline of baryogenesis.
The structural point: two phase transitions in the Standard Model that are usually independent become causally linked. The electroweak transition waits for the QCD transition. The hierarchy between their scales (160 GeV vs. 200 MeV) is bridged by the Higgs potential being flatter than expected. A small change in one sector's parameters creates a dependency between sectors that are otherwise decoupled.
The strong force doesn't just confine quarks. Under the right conditions, it triggers the mechanism that gives particles mass.