Can electroweak bubble walls run away

By D. Bodeker, Guy D. Moore. 2009

314 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In extensions of the Standard Model with SU(2) singlet scalar fields, there can be regions of parameter space for which the electroweak phase transition is first order already at the mean-field level of analysis. We show that in this case the phase interface (bubble wall) can become ultra-relativistic, with the relativistic gamma factor {gamma} = (1-v{sub wall}{sup 2}){sup -1/2} growing linearly with the wall's propagation distance. We provide a simple criterion for determining whether the bubble wall ''runs away'' in this way or if {gamma} approaches a terminal value.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c065fe650956ea7dc39b7f1d0b68f2c9b4fca420

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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. John Ellis
2. Marek Lewicki
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4. T. Konstandin
5. V. Vaskonen
6. C. Caprini
7. D. Bodeker
8. G. Servant

Citations in the corpus

• Energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transitions (2010, methodology): “Let us first quickly present the main result of [27] that is based on the analysis of refs.”
• Updated predictions for gravitational waves produced in a strongly supercooled phase transition (2020, background): “Over the years many groups have contributed to the progress in this notoriously difficult calculation [52–59].”
• The Gravitational-Wave Physics (2017, background): “A simple criterion was found in [60] that the bubble walls will runaway if the effective potential in the true vacuum remains deeper than the false vacuum even after replacing the thermal potential by its second-order Taylor expansion term in the false vacuum, but not vice versa.”
• Baryogenesis from the weak scale to the grand unification scale (2020, background): “A relatively simple case is ultrarelativistic bubbles with γw ≡ (1 − v2w)−1/2 1 (Bodeker and Moore, 2009).”
• Gravitational wave energy budget in strongly supercooled phase transitions (2019, background): “LO. 2.6) and (2.7) in the equation of motion (2.3) by writing p V P LO P NLO : (2.9) We note that the above simplied treatment holds provided that V > P LO (known previously as runaway behaviour [49]) 4. We can now solve numerically the equation of motion (2.3) with the pressure term (2.9) to nd ”
• Electroweak bubble wall speed limit (2017, background): “The analysis of [14] considered only the leading order in the couplings, which means that it neglected any interactions of medium excitations other than those with the electroweak bubble wall.”
• Gravitational waves from first order cosmological phase transitions in the Sound Shell Model (2019, background): “However, if this coupling is sufficiently weak, or the supercooling sufficiently large, the friction may be insufficient to prevent the wall from continuing to accelerate in a so-called run-away [20, 34, 35].”
• Bubble wall velocity: heavy physics effects (2020, methodology): “[15] finds a saturation of the friction (this limit is dubbed “ballistic”), which is in agreement with the results of [11] (i.”
• On the maximal strength of a first-order electroweak phase transition and its gravitational wave signal (2018, methodology): “A leading-order evaluation of the friction on a phase transition bubble expanding at ultrarelativistic speeds γ 1 [68] showed that the relativistic flux of particles crossing the bubble wall exert only a bounded, i.”
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, background): “It is, however, still possible to get luminal wall velocities [10].”