Numerical simulations of acoustically generated gravitational waves at a first order phase transition

By M. Hindmarsh, S. Huber, K. Rummukainen, D. Weir. 2015

472 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present details of numerical simulations of the gravitational radiation produced by a first order thermal phase transition in the early universe. We confirm that the dominant source of gravitational waves is sound waves generated by the expanding bubbles of the low-temperature phase. We demonstrate that the sound waves have a power spectrum with a power-law form between the scales set by the average bubble separation (which sets the length scale of the fluid flow Lf) and the bubble wall width. The sound waves generate gravitational waves whose power spectrum also has a power-law form, at a rate proportional to Lf and the square of the fluid kinetic energy density. We

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1201e9506a7b737adba3a03f480d30fcd233dc33

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Marek Lewicki
2. John Ellis
3. J. No
4. T. Konstandin
5. C. Caprini
6. V. Vaskonen
7. M. Hindmarsh
8. G. Servant

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Marek Lewicki
2. John Ellis
3. J. No
4. Mulham Hijazi
5. M. Hindmarsh
6. T. Konstandin
7. Joachim Kopp
8. Marco Peloso

Citations in the corpus

• Model-independent energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transitions—A sound argument to go beyond the bag model (2020, methodology): “This test was performed in [21, 23] assuming the bag model which gave deviations of up to O(25%).”
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, background): “Simulations show that the sound waves typically remain active as a source of GW much longer than the collisions of the bubble walls [20].”
• Phase transitions in an expanding universe: stochastic gravitational waves in standard and non-standard histories (2020, methodology): “It can be parametrized in the following way due to the overall spatial homogeneity of the universe [49] 〈π ij(η1,q1)π ij(η2,q2)〉 = Π(q1, η1, η2)(2π)δ(q1 + q2).”
• The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, background): “the updated simulations [87, 88] and theoretically modeled in [89], before which the possibility of having an inverse acoustic cascade was investigated in [90], suggesting the potentially very strong enhancement of the sound wave density at small wave number.”
• Gravitational waves from first-order cosmological phase transitions: lifetime of the sound wave source (2020, methodology): “A related quantity, which will also prove crucial for GW emission, is the root-mean-square (RMS) four-velocity of the plasma Ūf [17, 19, 20] (see also [7]), defined by”
• Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “Denoting the lifetime of the velocity perturbations by τv, the peak GW amplitude can be estimated as [182,184]”
• Dark, cold, and noisy: constraining secluded hidden sectors with gravitational waves (2018, background): “Collision of sound waves in the plasma generated during bubble expansion [55].”
• Gravitational waves from first order cosmological phase transitions in the Sound Shell Model (2019, methodology): “Based on the results of numerical simulations [10–12], it is justifiable to assume that the velocity field is irrotational and statistically homogeneous, in which case the the two-point function can be written 〈 ṽ q1(t1)ṽ ∗j q2(t2) 〉 = q̂ 1q̂ j 1G(q1, t1, t2)(2π) δ(q1 − q2).”
• Gravitational wave energy budget in strongly supercooled phase transitions (2019, background): “This gives rise to sound waves propagating in the plasma after the transition that source GWs [59–62].”
• Gravitational wave, collider and dark matter signals from a scalar singlet electroweak baryogenesis (2017, background): “The corresponding peak frequency is [61, 62]”
• Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “a kination dominated phase [46–50], non-perturbative particle production phenomena [51–62], oscillon dynamics [63–67], strong first order phase transitions [68–81], or cosmic defect networks [82–93].”