Gravitational waves from first-order cosmological phase transitions: lifetime of the sound wave source

By John Ellis, Marek Lewicki, J. No. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2020

186 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We survey systematically the general parametrisations of particle-physics models for a first-order phase transition in the early universe, including models with polynomial potentials both with and without barriers at zero temperature, and Coleman-Weinberg-like models with potentials that are classically scale-invariant. We distinguish three possibilities for the transition—detonations, deflagrations and hybrids—and consider sound waves and turbulent mechanisms for generating gravitational waves during the transitions in these models, checking in each case the requirement for successful percolation. We argue that in models without a zero-temperature barrier and in scale-invariant models the period during which sound waves generate gravitational waves lasts only for a fraction of a Hubble time after a generic first-order cosmological phase transition, whereas it may last longer in some models with a zero-temperature barrier that feature severe supercooling. We illustrate the implications of these results for future gravitational-wave experiments.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/904c5a4319c94ad148e0ac8767723e59eb09b242

Citations in the corpus

• Matter-wave Atomic Gradiometer Interferometric Sensor (MAGIS-100) (2021, unknown): “At much lower frequencies, the planned space-based LISA detector is targeted at the 1 mHz–50 mHz range [71].”