Gravitational waves from Higgs domain walls

Abstract

The effective potential for the Standard Model Higgs field allows two quasi-degenerate vacua; one is our vacuum at the electroweak scale, while the other is at a much higher scale. The latter minimum may be at a scale much smaller than the Planck scale, if the potential is lifted by new physics. This gives rise to a possibility of domain wall formation after inflation. If the high-scale minimum is a local minimum, domain walls are unstable and disappear through violent annihilation processes, producing a significant amount of gravitational waves. We estimate the amount of gravitational waves produced from unstable domain walls in the Higgs potential and discuss detectability with future experiments.

15 pages, 3 figures; v2: title changed, comments and references added; v3: accepted for publication in PLB

References in corpus (7)

• Observation of a new particle in the search for the Standard Model Higgs boson with the ATLAS detector at the LHC
• Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC
• Scientific Objectives of Einstein Telescope
• Consistent Use of the Standard Model Effective Potential
• A study of electroweak vacuum metastability with a singlet scalar dark matter
• Topological Higgs inflation: The origin of the Standard Model criticality
• Gravitational Waves as a Probe of the Gravitino Mass

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Domain walls and gravitational waves in the Standard Model
• Parameter-free velocity-dependent one-scale model for domain walls
• The gravitational waves from the collapsing domain walls in the complex singlet model