Thermal Inflation and the Gravitational Wave Background

Abstract

We consider the impact of thermal inflation -- a short, secondary period of inflation that can arise in supersymmetric scenarios -- on the stochastic gravitational wave background. We show that while the primordial inflationary gravitational wave background is essentially unchanged at CMB scales, it is massively diluted at solar system scales and would be unobservable by a BBO style experiment. Conversely, bubble collisions at the end of thermal inflation can generate a new stochastic background. We calculate the likely properties of the bubbles created during this phase transition, and show that the expected amplitude and frequency of this signal would fall within the BBO range.

21 pages, 4 figures; accepted for JCAP; a reference added; table reformatted

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• Gravity Waves from Tachyonic Preheating after Hybrid Inflation
• Bayesian Analysis of Inflation: Parameter Estimation for Single Field Models
• String Fragmentation in Supercooled Confinement and Implications for Dark Matter
• The hybrid inflation waterfall and the primordial curvature perturbation
• Gravitational waves from first order phase transitions as a probe of an early matter domination era and its inverse problem
• Gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions: Towards model separation by bubble nucleation rate
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• Thermal inflation, baryogenesis and axions
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• 3-pt Statistics of Cosmological Stochastic Gravitational Waves
• Axion Models with High Scale Inflation
• Bubble collision with gravitation
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• Early dark energy by dark Higgs, and axion-induced non-thermal trapping
• A simple model for particle physics and cosmology
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• Gravitational waves from cosmic bubble collisions
• Langevin description of gauged scalar fields in a thermal bath
• How an era of kination impacts substructure and the dark matter annihilation rate
• Small-scale Effects of Thermal Inflation on Halo Abundance at High-$z$, Galaxy Substructure Abundance and 21-cm Power Spectrum
• What happens when supercooling is terminated by curvature flipping of the effective potential?