Gravitational waves from vacuum first-order phase transitions: From the envelope to the lattice

By D. Cutting, M. Hindmarsh, D. Weir. Physical Review D, 2018

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We conduct large scale numerical simulations of gravitational wave production at a first-order vacuum phase transition. We find a power law for the gravitational wave power spectrum at high wave number which falls off as k−1.5 rather than the k−1 produced by the envelope approximation. The peak of the power spectrum is shifted to slightly lower wave numbers from that of the envelope approximation. The envelope approximation reproduces our results for the peak power less well, agreeing only to within an order of magnitude. After the bubbles finish colliding, the scalar field oscillates around the true vacuum. An additional feature is produced in the UV of the gravitational wave power spectrum, and this continues to grow linearly until the end of our simulation. The additional feature peaks at a length scale close to the bubble wall thickness and is shown to have a negligible contribution to the energy in gravitational waves, providing the scalar field mass is much smaller than the Planck mass.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7e4ab410cc241b6f71180d86dda784863f6e2553

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. T. Konstandin
5. C. Caprini
6. V. Vaskonen
7. M. Hindmarsh
8. G. Servant

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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

Citations in the corpus

• 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].”
• Gravitational wave energy budget in strongly supercooled phase transitions (2019, methodology): “The contribution to the GW signal from the bubble collisions is then given by [58]”
• Gravitational waves from first-order cosmological phase transitions: lifetime of the sound wave source (2020, methodology): “We start with the contribution to the GW signal from bubble collisions, as given approximately by [27]:”
• Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, unknown): “5 [226]).”
• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update (2019, background): “In a runaway, most of the available energy at the transition goes into the kinetic energy of the bubble walls, and gravitational radiation from the collision phase dominates, although latest numerical simulations show that the shear stresses in the collision region have a more complex behaviour than”
• Updated predictions for gravitational waves produced in a strongly supercooled phase transition (2020, background): “calculated in a 3D lattice simulation [88–90], practical realisations are made difficult by the hierarchy between the size of the growing bubble and its very thin wall in strong transitions.”
• Gravitational waves from first order cosmological phase transitions in the Sound Shell Model (2019, background): “We term this scenario simultaneous nucleation [38].”