scholarly journals Phase transitions in the early universe

Author(s):  
Mark Hindmarsh ◽  
Marvin Lüben ◽  
Johannes Lumma ◽  
Martin Pauly

These lecture notes are based on a course given by Mark Hindmarsh at the 24th Saalburg Summer School 2018 and written up by Marvin Lüben, Johannes Lumma and Martin Pauly. The aim is to provide the necessary basics to understand first-order phase transitions in the early universe, to outline how they leave imprints in gravitational waves, and advertise how those gravitational waves could be detected in the future. A first-order phase transition at the electroweak scale is a prediction of many theories beyond the Standard Model, and is also motivated as an ingredient of some theories attempting to provide an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. Starting from bosonic and fermionic statistics, we derive Boltzmann's equation and generalise to a fluid of particles with field dependent mass. We introduce the thermal effective potential for the field in its lowest order approximation, discuss the transition to the Higgs phase in the Standard Model and beyond, and compute the probability for the field to cross a potential barrier. After these preliminaries, we provide a hydrodynamical description of first-order phase transitions as it is appropriate for describing the early Universe. We thereby discuss the key quantities characterising a phase transition, and how they are imprinted in the gravitational wave power spectrum that might be detectable by the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA in the 2030s.

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (08) ◽  
pp. 1750049 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Addazi

We discuss the possibility to indirectly test first-order phase transitions of hidden sectors. We study the interesting example of a Dark Standard Model (D-SM) with a deformed parameter space in the Higgs potential. A dark electroweak phase transition can be limited from next future experiments like eLISA and DECIGO.


2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (31) ◽  
pp. 1844019
Author(s):  
Jisuke Kubo

We consider two realistic models for a scale invariant extension of the standard model, which couples with a hidden non-Abelian gauge sector. At energies around TeV, the hidden sector becomes strongly interacting, thereby generating a robust energy scale, which is transferred to the standard model sector, triggering the electroweak symmetry breaking. At a finite temperature, i.e. in the early Universe, the generation of the robust energy scale appears as a strong first-order phase transition. We calculate the gravitational wave background spectrum for both models, which is produced by the first-order phase transition. We compare the results with the experimental sensitivity of LISA and DECIGO and find the gravitational wave signal may be detected at DECIGO.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (12) ◽  
pp. 019
Author(s):  
Ryusuke Jinno ◽  
Thomas Konstandin ◽  
Henrique Rubira ◽  
Jorinde van de Vis

Abstract We study the effect of density perturbations on the process of first-order phase transitions and gravitational wave production in the early Universe. We are mainly interested in how the distribution of nucleated bubbles is affected by fluctuations in the local temperature. We find that large-scale density fluctuations (H * < k * < β) result in a larger effective bubble size at the time of collision, enhancing the produced amplitude of gravitational waves. The amplitude of the density fluctuations necessary for this enhancement is 𝒫ζ (k *) ≳ (β/H *)-2, and therefore the gravitational wave signal from first-order phase transitions with relatively large β/H * can be significantly enhanced by this mechanism even for fluctuations with moderate amplitudes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (33) ◽  
pp. 1950223
Author(s):  
Mikael Chala ◽  
Valentin V. Khoze ◽  
Michael Spannowsky ◽  
Philip Waite

We study the dependence of the observable stochastic gravitational wave background induced by a first-order phase transition on the global properties of the scalar effective potential in particle physics. The scalar potential can be that of the Standard Model Higgs field, or more generally of any scalar field responsible for a spontaneous symmetry breaking in beyond-the-Standard-Model settings that provide for a first-order phase transition in the early universe. Characteristics of the effective potential include the relative depth of the true minimum [Formula: see text], the height of the barrier that separates it from the false one [Formula: see text] and the separation between the two minima in field space [Formula: see text], all at the bubble nucleation temperature. We focus on a simple yet quite general class of single-field polynomial potentials, with parameters being varied over several orders of magnitude. It is then shown that gravitational wave observatories such as aLIGO O5, BBO, DECIGO and LISA are mostly sensitive to values of these parameters in the region [Formula: see text]. Finally, relying on well-defined models and using our framework, we demonstrate how to obtain the gravitational wave spectra for potentials of various shapes without necessarily relying on dedicated software packages.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Djuna Croon ◽  
Oliver Gould ◽  
Philipp Schicho ◽  
Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen ◽  
Graham White

Abstract We critically examine the magnitude of theoretical uncertainties in perturbative calculations of fist-order phase transitions, using the Standard Model effective field theory as our guide. In the usual daisy-resummed approach, we find large uncertainties due to renormalisation scale dependence, which amount to two to three orders-of-magnitude uncertainty in the peak gravitational wave amplitude, relevant to experiments such as LISA. Alternatively, utilising dimensional reduction in a more sophisticated perturbative approach drastically reduces this scale dependence, pushing it to higher orders. Further, this approach resolves other thorny problems with daisy resummation: it is gauge invariant which is explicitly demonstrated for the Standard Model, and avoids an uncontrolled derivative expansion in the bubble nucleation rate.


2009 ◽  
Vol 24 (08n09) ◽  
pp. 1541-1544
Author(s):  
ARIEL MÉGEVAND

I discuss the gravitational radiation produced in a first-order phase transition due to the turbulence that is caused by bubble expansion. I compare the cases of deflagration and detonation bubbles.


Author(s):  
Michael Kachelriess

As the early universe cools down, it may perform transitions to phases with more and more broken symmetries. In a first-order phase transition, fields may be trapped in the false vacuum; the rate of the resulting tunneling process to the true vacuum is derived. Phase transitions can lead also to the formation of topological defects. Their structure and the reason for their stability are discussed.


2022 ◽  
Vol 2022 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel Reichert ◽  
Francesco Sannino ◽  
Zhi-Wei Wang ◽  
Chen Zhang

Abstract We study the gravitational-wave signal stemming from strongly coupled models featuring both, dark chiral and confinement phase transitions. We therefore identify strongly coupled theories that can feature a first-order phase transition. Employing the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, we focus our attention on SU(3) Yang-Mills theories featuring fermions in fundamental, adjoint, and two-index symmetric representations. We discover that for the gravitational-wave signals analysis, there are significant differences between the various representations. Interestingly we also observe that the two-index symmetric representation leads to the strongest first-order phase transition and therefore to a higher chance of being detected by the Big Bang Observer experiment. Our study of the confinement and chiral phase transitions is further applicable to extensions of the Standard Model featuring composite dynamics.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Danny Marfatia ◽  
Po-Yan Tseng

Abstract Fermion dark matter particles can aggregate to form extended dark matter structures via a first-order phase transition in which the particles get trapped in the false vacuum. We study Fermi balls created in a phase transition induced by a generic quartic thermal effective potential. We show that for Fermi balls of mass, 3 × 10−12M⊙ ≲ MFB ≲ 10−5M⊙, correlated observations of gravitational waves produced during the phase transition (at SKA/THEIA/μAres), and gravitational microlensing caused by Fermi balls (at Subaru-HSC), can be made.


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