A Nearly Scale Invariant Spectrum of Gravitational Radiation from Global Phase Transitions

Abstract

Using a large N sigma model approximation we explicitly calculate the power spectrum of gravitational waves arising from a global phase transition in the early universe and we confirm that it is scale invariant, implying an observation of such a spectrum may not be a unique feature of inflation. Moreover, the predicted amplitude can be over 3 orders of magnitude larger than the naive dimensional estimate, implying that even a transition that occurs after inflation may dominate in Cosmic Microwave Background polarization or other gravity wave signals.

4 pages, PRL published version

References in corpus (1)

• Three Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Polarization Analysis

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