General properties of the gravitational wave spectrum from phase transitions

By C. Caprini, R. Durrer, T. Konstandin, G. Servant. 2009

231 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper we discuss some general aspects of the gravitational wave background arising from postinflationary short-lasting cosmological events such as phase transitions. We concentrate on the physics which determines the shape and the peak frequency of the gravitational wave spectrum. We then apply our general findings to the case of bubble collisions during a first order phase transition and compare different results in the recent literature.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52fe2de394e298bc0d73ac44f026cd503fa4624e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. C. Caprini
2. Marek Lewicki
3. T. Konstandin
4. John Ellis
5. J. No
6. K. Saikawa
7. G. Servant
8. R. Durrer

Citations in the corpus

• Cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves and eLISA/NGO: phase transitions, cosmic strings and other sources (2012, methodology): “14 due to the very small kinetic viscosity, the MHD turbulence dissipates slowly in the early universe: therefore, the GW source is in general active for many Hubble times after the completion of the PT.”
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, background): “Causality implies that at low frequency the spectral index is q = 3 [28].”
• Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor (MAGIS-100) (2021, unknown): “A transition occurring with nucleation temperature T n (cid:5) 1 TeV typically leads to a stochastic spectrum with a peak occurring at frequency f (cid:5) 2 × 10 − 2 Hz [80].”
• 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].”
• A Review of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Domain Walls (2017, background): “The behavior Sk ∝ k3 at small k can be deduced from causality [46,62].”
• Updated predictions for gravitational waves produced in a strongly supercooled phase transition (2020, background): “Beyond the horizon size at the time of production, the spectrum from a short-lasting source, such as a phase transition, is ∝ f3 in standard radiation-dominated expansion [111, 112], but the behaviour changes to ∝ f1 for scales re-entering the horizon during matter domination [113].”
• The stochastic gravitational wave background from turbulence and magnetic fields generated by a first-order phase transition (2009, methodology): “[14], the time continuity in switching the source on and off can be relevant for the GW spectrum.”
• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update (2019, background): “Reference [49] attempted to include the free-decay, but to guarantee positivity of the GW power spectrum introduced a “top-hat” modelling of the shear stress two-time correlation function that sets the autocorrelation time of the shear stresses to the light-crossing time on a given scale [47,49].”
• The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, result): “The state-of-the-art results of the GWs spectrum from PTs due to colliding bubble walls were settled down in [70], which although disagreed with earlier study [71], they finally achieved consensus in [72].”
• On the estimation of gravitational wave spectrum from cosmic domain walls (2013, background): “J C A P 0 2 ( 2 0 1 4 ) 0 3 1 We note that the spectrum at low frequencies f < fh can be deduced from the requirement of causality [53].”
• Gravitational waves from first order cosmological phase transitions in the Sound Shell Model (2019, unknown): “The model is distinguished from earlier work [44–47] by the recognition that long-lasting sound waves are the main source of gravitational radiation, and by the computation of their power spectrum from the hydrodynamic solution.”