Gravitational wave generation from bubble collisions in first-order phase transitions: an analytic approach

Abstract

Gravitational wave production from bubble collisions was calculated in the early nineties using numerical simulations. In this paper, we present an alternative analytic estimate, relying on a different treatment of stochasticity. In our approach, we provide a model for the bubble velocity power spectrum, suitable for both detonations and deflagrations. From this, we derive the anisotropic stress and analytically solve the gravitational wave equation. We provide analytical formulae for the peak frequency and the shape of the spectrum which we compare with numerical estimates. In contrast to the previous analysis, we do not work in the envelope approximation. This paper focuses on a particular source of gravitational waves from phase transitions. In a companion article, we will add together the different sources of gravitational wave signals from phase transitions: bubble collisions, turbulence and magnetic fields and discuss the prospects for probing the electroweak phase transition at LISA.

48 pages, 14 figures. v2 (PRD version): calculation refined; plots redone starting from Fig. 4. Factor 2 in GW energy spectrum corrected. Main conclusions unchanged. v3: Note added at the end of paper to comment on the new results of 0901.1661

References in corpus (6)

• Gravitational Wave Production by Collisions: More Bubbles
• Theory and Numerics of Gravitational Waves from Preheating after Inflation
• A Gravitational Wave Background from Reheating after Hybrid Inflation
• A Confining Strong First-Order Electroweak Phase Transition
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• Production of Gravitational Waves in the nMSSM
• Detonations and deflagrations in cosmological phase transitions
• Gravitational waves from the fragmentation of a supersymmetric condensate
• Stochastic Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves from Cosmological Sources: Techniques and Applications to Preheating
• Thermal Inflation and the Gravitational Wave Background
• Gravitational waves from deflagration bubbles in first-order phase transitions
• Gravitational Waves from the Non-Perturbative Decay of Condensates along Supersymmetric Flat Directions
• Effects of the cosmological expansion on the bubble nucleation rate for relativistic first-order phase transitions