Journal
JOURNAL OF COSMOLOGY AND ASTROPARTICLE PHYSICS
Volume -, Issue 3, Pages -Publisher
IOP PUBLISHING LTD
DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2010/03/003
Keywords
gravitational waves / theory; cosmological phase transitions
Funding
- US Department of Energy (DoE), Office of Science, High Energy Physics [DEFG02-04ER41268]
- NSF [PHY-0757911]
- UCSC
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [GRANTS:13765131] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics [GRANTS:13765131] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Physics
- Direct For Mathematical & Physical Scien [0757911] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Upcoming gravitational wave (GW) detectors might detect a stochastic background of GWs potentially arising from many possible sources, including bubble collisions from a strongly first-order electroweak phase transition. We investigate whether it is possible to connect, via a semi-analytical approximation to the tunneling rate of scalar fields with quartic potentials, the GW signal through detonations with the parameters entering the potential that drives the electroweak phase transition. To this end, we consider a finite temperature effective potential similar in form to the Higgs potential in the Standard Model (SM). In the context of a semi-analytic approximation to the three dimensional Euclidean action, we derive a general approximate form for the tunneling temperature and the relevant GW parameters. We explore the GW signal across the parameter space describing the potential which drives the phase transition. We comment on the potential detectability of a GW signal with future experiments, and physical relevance of the associated potential parameters in the context of theories which have effective potentials similar in form to that of the SM. In particular we consider singlet, triplet, higher dimensional operators, and top-flavor extensions to the Higgs sector of the SM. We find that the addition of a temperature independent cubic term in the potential, arising from a gauge singlet for instance, can greatly enhance the GW power. The other parameters have milder, but potentially noticeable, effects.
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