Gravitational Waves from the Cosmological Quark-Hadron Phase Transition Revisited

The recent claim by the NANOGrav collaboration of a possible detection of an isotropic gravitational wave background stimulated a series of investigations searching for the origin of such a signal. The QCD phase transition appears as a natural candidate and in this paper the gravitational spectrum generated during the conversion of quarks into hadrons is calculated. Here, contrary to recent studies, equations of state for the quark-gluon plasma issued from the lattice approach were adopted. The duration of the transition, an important parameter affecting the amplitude of the gravitational wave spectrum, was estimated self-consistently with the dynamics of the universe controlled by the Einstein equations. The gravitational signal generated during the transition peaks around 0.28 mu Hz with amplitude of h02 omega gw approximate to 7.6x10-11, being unable to explain the claimed NANOGrav signal. However, the expected QCD gravitational wave background could be detected by the planned spatial interferometer Big Bang Observer in its advanced version for frequencies above 1.0 mHz. This possible detection assumes that algorithms recently proposed will be able to disentangle the cosmological signal from that expected for the astrophysical background generated by black hole binaries.

Automated summary

The paper explores the gravitational wave background generated during the QCD phase transition, using equations of state for quark-gluon plasma and estimating the duration of the transition. While the signal generated was unable to explain the claimed NANOGrav signal, the expected QCD gravitational wave background could potentially be detected by the planned Big Bang Observer for frequencies above 1.0 mHz.