Friction forces on phase transition fronts

Abstract

In cosmological first-order phase transitions, the microscopic interaction of the phase transition fronts with non-equilibrium plasma particles manifests itself macroscopically as friction forces. In general, it is a nontrivial problem to compute these forces, and only two limits have been studied, namely, that of very slow walls and, more recently, ultra-relativistic walls which run away. In this paper we consider ultra-relativistic velocities and show that stationary solutions still exist when the parameters allow the existence of runaway walls. Hence, we discuss the necessary and sufficient conditions for the fronts to actually run away. We also propose a phenomenological model for the friction, which interpolates between the non-relativistic and ultra-relativistic values. Thus, the friction depends on two friction coefficients which can be calculated for specific models. We then study the velocity of phase transition fronts as a function of the friction parameters, the thermodynamic parameters, and the amount of supercooling.

34 pages, 7 figures. v2: minor corrections

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• Fluid equations for fast-moving electroweak bubble walls
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• Bubble wall dynamics at the electroweak phase transition
• Hydrodynamics of phase transition fronts and the speed of sound in the plasma
• Gravitational waves from a very strong electroweak phase transition
• Effective picture of bubble expansion
• Wall speed and shape in singlet-assisted strong electroweak phase transitions
• Bubble wall velocity during electroweak phase transition in the inert doublet model
• Collision Integrals for Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Bubble wall velocity beyond leading-log approximation in electroweak phase transition
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• Lower bound on the electroweak wall velocity from hydrodynamic instability
• Energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transition in FLRW background
• Model-dependent analysis method for energy budget of the cosmological first-order phase transition
• Model-independent features of gravitational waves from bubble collisions
• Dynamics of bubble walls at the electroweak phase transition
• Phenomenology of electroweak bubbles and gravitational waves in the Littlest Higgs Model with T parity
• Gravitational waves from bubble walls