CosmoTransitions: Computing cosmological phase transition temperatures and bubble profiles with multiple fields

By Carroll L. Wainwright. Computer Physics Communications, 2011

516 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract I present a numerical package (CosmoTransitions) for analyzing finite-temperature cosmological phase transitions driven by single or multiple scalar fields. The package analyzes the different vacua of a theory to determine their critical temperatures (where the vacuum energy levels are degenerate), their supercooling temperatures, and the bubble wall profiles which separate the phases and describe their tunneling dynamics. I introduce a new method of path deformation to find the profiles of both thin- and thick-walled bubbles. CosmoTransitions is freely available for public use. Program summary Program Title:  CosmoTransitions Catalogue identifier:  AEML_v1_0 Program summary URL: http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/summaries/AEML_v1_0.html Program obtainable from:  CPC Program Library, Queen’s University, Belfast, N. Ireland Licensing provisions:  Standard CPC licence, http://cpc.cs.qub.ac.uk/licence/licence.html No. of lines in distributed program, including test data, etc.:  8775 No. of bytes in distributed program, including test data, etc.:  621096 Distribution format:  tar.gz Programming language:  Python. Computer:  Developed on a 2009 MacBook Pro. No computer-specific optimization was performed. Operating system:  Designed and tested on Mac OS X 10.6.8. Compatible with any OS with Python installed. RAM:  Approximately 50 MB, mostly for loading plotting packages. Classification:  1.9, 11.1. External routines:  SciPy, NumPy, matplotLib Nature of problem:  I describe a program to analyze early-Universe finite-temperature phase transitions with multiple scalar fields. The goal is to analyze the phase structure of an input theory, determine the amount of supercooling at each phase transition, and find the bubble-wall profiles of the nucleated bubbles that drive the transitions. Solution method:  To find the bubble-wall profile, the program assumes that tunneling happens along a fixed path in field space. This reduces the equations of motion to one dimension, which can then be solved using the overshoot/undershoot method. The path iteratively deforms in the direction opposite the forces perpendicular to the path until the perpendicular forces vanish (or become very small). To find the phase structure, the program finds and integrates the change in a phase’s minimum with respect to temperature. Running time:  Approximately 1 minute for full analysis of the two-scalar-field test model on a 2.5 GHz CPU.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ca73e46aac497737ca96c42386befc0e4609f4c

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. J. No
2. T. Konstandin
3. C. Caprini
4. M. Hindmarsh
5. R. Cai
6. G. White
7. Marek Lewicki
8. G. Servant

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. T. Konstandin
2. J. No
3. C. Caprini
4. G. Servant
5. S. Huber
6. M. Hindmarsh
7. R. Cai
8. S. Bruggisser

Citations in the corpus

• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update (2019, methodology): “We compute the bounce with a modified version of the CosmoTransitions pathDeformation module [78], and use this to determine β/H and α at T∗.”
• Electroweak phase transition and baryogenesis in composite Higgs models (2018, background): “12) can be nicely separated into parts parallel and perpendicular to the path [89,90]: d(2)x ds2 + 2 s dx ds = ∂xV [~ φg[x]] (A.”
• Exploring New Models in All Detail with SARAH (2015, methodology): “If the input minimum turns out not to be the global one, life-time of meta-stable vacua can be calculated using Cosmotransitions [317].”
• SARAH 4: A tool for (not only SUSY) model builders (2013, methodology): “In those checks the possibility of dangerous vacuum expectation values (VEVs) of charged and/or colored scalars can be taken into account and the life-time of meta-stable vacua can be calculated using Cosmotransitions [39].”
• Dark, cold, and noisy: constraining secluded hidden sectors with gravitational waves (2018, unknown): “To obtain these plots, we have simulated the phase transition using the CosmoTransitions package [74–77], which we have extended to compute gravitational wave parameters and to improve the stability and performance during parameter scans.”
• Phase transitions in an expanding universe: stochastic gravitational waves in standard and non-standard histories (2020, background): “20 and the corresponding S3(σ) shown as red dotted and green dashed lines for solutions solved from CosmoTransitions [109] and BubbleProfiler [110] respectively.”
• Theoretical uncertainties for cosmological first-order phase transitions (2020, methodology): “[141, 142],14 which we have crosschecked against the numerical package CosmoTransitions [143].”
• The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, methodology): “When multiple fields are involved at play, four approaches were introduced in the literatures, the early trial [44], the undamping/damping algorithm [45], the wildly adopted path deformation algorithm [46], and the recently proposed semi-analytic perturbative approach [47].”