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Shape of the acoustic gravitational wave power spectrum from a first order phase transition

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22 Pith papers citing it
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abstract

We present results from large-scale numerical simulations of a first order thermal phase transition in the early universe, in order to explore the shape of the acoustic gravitational wave and the velocity power spectra. We compare the results with the predictions of the recently proposed sound shell model. For the gravitational wave power spectrum, we find that the predicted $k^{-3}$ behaviour, where $k$ is the wavenumber, emerges clearly for detonations. The power spectra from deflagrations show similar features, but exhibit a steeper high-$k$ decay and an extra feature not accounted for in the model. There are two independent length scales: the mean bubble separation and the thickness of the sound shell around the expanding bubble of the low temperature phase. It is the sound shell thickness which sets the position of the peak of the power spectrum. The low wavenumber behaviour of the velocity power spectrum is consistent with a causal $k^{3}$, except for the thinnest sound shell, where it is steeper. We present parameters for a simple broken power law fit to the gravitational wave power spectrum for wall speeds well away from the speed of sound where this form can be usefully applied. We examine the prospects for the detection, showing that a LISA-like mission has the sensitivity to detect a gravitational wave signal from sound waves with an RMS fluid velocity of about $0.05c$, produced from bubbles with a mean separation of about $10^{-2}$ of the Hubble radius. The shape of the gravitational wave power spectrum depends on the bubble wall speed, and it may be possible to estimate the wall speed, and constrain other phase transition parameters, with an accurate measurement of a stochastic gravitational wave background.

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LeWRON: Agentic Analysis of Electroweak Phase Transitions

hep-ph · 2026-06-17 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

LeWRON is a new agentic framework that automates construction, auditing, and exploration of finite-temperature effective potentials and gravitational-wave predictions for electroweak phase transitions starting from an input Lagrangian.

Polyakov Loops Tame Phase Transitions

hep-ph · 2026-07-07 · conditional · novelty 6.0

Polyakov loop contributions to the thermal effective potential soften electroweak phase transitions, disfavoring first-order transitions and suppressing gravitational-wave signals.

Electroweak Baryogenesis from Collapsing Domain Walls

hep-ph · 2026-04-30 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Collapsing axion-like domain walls generate the baryon asymmetry by acting as an effective chemical potential through coupling to the electroweak topological term, with the asymmetry produced via sphaleron processes.

Reviving WIMP dark matter with temperature-dependent couplings

hep-ph · 2025-09-08 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

Temperature-dependent DM couplings mediated by a scalar field's VEV that drops after a first-order phase transition allow sufficient early-universe annihilations for the observed relic density while evading current direct detection bounds.

Solving Cosmological Puzzles using Finite Temperature $\nu$SMEFT

hep-ph · 2026-04-23 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

A minimal extension of the Standard Model with three heavy Majorana neutrinos simultaneously realizes fermionic dark matter, a strong first-order electroweak phase transition, and low-scale resonant leptogenesis consistent with neutrino data.

Probing High-Quality Axions with Gravitational Waves

hep-ph · 2026-04-10 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

High-quality axion models with N_DW=1 and dark matter abundance requirement restrict the gauge breaking scale to 1.6e11-1e16 GeV, yielding a band of gravitational wave signals from two-step phase transitions consistent with current observations.

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