Gravitational Waves from Phase Transitions at the Electroweak Scale and Beyond

By Christophe Grojean, G. Servant. 2006

355 citations recorded by the source corpus.

If there was a first-order phase transition in the early universe, there should be an associated stochastic background of gravitational waves. In this paper, we point out that the characteristic frequency of the spectrum due to phase transitions which took place in the temperature range 100 GeV-10{sup 7} GeV is precisely in the window that will be probed by the second generation of space-based interferometers such as the big bang observer (BBO). Taking into account the astrophysical foreground, we determine the type of phase transitions which could be detected either at LISA, LIGO or BBO, in terms of the amount of supercooling and the duration of the phase transition that are needed. Those two quantities can be calculated for any given effective scalar potential describing the phase transition. In particular, the new models of electroweak symmetry-breaking which have been proposed in the last few years typically have a different Higgs potential from the standard model. They could lead to a gravitational wave signature in the milli-Hertz frequency, which is precisely the peak sensitivity of LISA. We also show that the signal coming from phase transitions taking place at T{approx}1-100 TeV could entirely screen the relic gravitational wave signal expected frommore » standard inflationary models.« less

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/da481c77f8693e6aafcfbbc5a89e606292dff5b7

How researchers see this paper

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

In Artificial Intelligence

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

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

Citations in the corpus

• Cosmological backgrounds of gravitational waves and eLISA/NGO: phase transitions, cosmic strings and other sources (2012, methodology): “As already mentioned, this has been exploited for example in Nicolis 2004 [29] and Grojean and Servant 2007 [50].”
• Gravitational wave, collider and dark matter signals from a scalar singlet electroweak baryogenesis (2017, background): “Secondly, a strong first-order phase transition generates a strong GW signal [19].”
• Gravitational wave production by collisions: more bubbles (2008, methodology): “This result is especially interesting in the light of recent investigations [7, 8] that indicate that in the case of a first-order electroweak phase transition (obtained by a singlet sector [14, 15] or higher dimensional operators [16]–[18]) the peak frequency of the radiation produced is below the ”
• Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. II: gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions (2015, methodology): “[4], and identify the quantities important for computing the GW signal from cosmological PTs.”
• Beyond the Standard Models with cosmic strings (2019, background): “For instance, it is customary to talk about LISA as a window on the EW scale [200, 227].”
• Higgs Boson studies at future particle colliders (2019, background): “It also offers a new bridge between Higgs physics and gravitational physics: in case of a strong first order phase transition, the EWΦT would be the source of a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background and future GW experiments like LISA could proffer complementary probes of the Higgs potential”
• Model-independent energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transitions—A sound argument to go beyond the bag model (2020, background): “The peak frequency of the gravitational wave signal of a cosmological first-order phase transition at electroweak temperatures lies in the mHz regime [20], and current experiments are therefore not suitable for observing cosmological phase transitions.”
• Phase transitions in an expanding universe: stochastic gravitational waves in standard and non-standard histories (2020, background): “They will come online within the next decade or so and can probe lower frequencies coming from an electroweak scale phase transition [13–28].”