Gravitational wave production from the decay of the Standard Model Higgs field after inflation

Abstract

During or towards the end of inflation, the Standard Model (SM) Higgs forms a condensate with a large amplitude. Following inflation, the condensate oscillates, decaying non-perturbatively into the rest of the SM species. The resulting out-of-equilibrium dynamics converts a fraction of the energy available into gravitational waves (GW). We study this process using classical lattice simulations in an expanding box, following the energetically dominant electroweak gauge bosons $W^{\pm }$ and $Z$. We characterize the GW spectrum as a function of the running couplings, Higgs initial amplitude, and post-inflationary expansion rate. As long as the SM is decoupled from the inflationary sector, the generation of this background is universally expected, independently of the nature of inflation. Our study demonstrates the efficiency of GW emission by gauge fields undergoing parametric resonance. The initial energy of the Higgs condensate represents however, only a tiny fraction of the inflationary energy. Consequently, the resulting background is very suppressed, with an amplitude $h^2{\Omega }_{\mathrm{GW}}^{(o)}\lesssim 10^{-29}$ today. The amplitude can be boosted to $h^2{\Omega }_{\mathrm{GW}}^{(o)}\lesssim 10^{-16}$, if following inflation the universe undergoes a kination-domination stage; however the background is shifted in this case to high frequencies $f_p\lesssim 10^{11}\mathrm{Hz}$. In all cases the signal is out of the range of current or planned GW detectors. This background will therefore remain, most likely, as a curiosity of the SM.

16 pages, 6 figures. Minor changes to match version published in PRD

References in corpus (23)

• Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
• 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
• The Standard Model Higgs boson as the inflaton
• Higgs inflation: consistency and generalisations
• Gravitational Wave Production by Collisions: More Bubbles
• Theory and Numerics of Gravitational Waves from Preheating after Inflation
• Gravitational wave generation from bubble collisions in first-order phase transitions: an analytic approach
• A Gravitational Wave Background from Reheating after Hybrid Inflation
• Cosmological implications of the Higgs mass measurement
• A stochastic background of gravitational waves from hybrid preheating
• Spacetime curvature and the Higgs stability during inflation
• Gravitational Waves from Abelian Gauge Fields and Cosmic Strings at Preheating
• Exact Scale-Invariant Background of Gravitational Waves from Cosmic Defects
• Higgs Dynamics during Inflation
• Probable or Improbable Universe? Correlating Electroweak Vacuum Instability with the Scale of Inflation
• Inflationary cosmology and the standard model Higgs with a small Hubble induced mass
• A Nearly Scale Invariant Spectrum of Gravitational Radiation from Global Phase Transitions
• Higgs condensation as an unwanted curvaton
• Non-Abelian dynamics in the resonant decay of the Higgs after inflation
• Cosmological Perturbations from the Standard Model Higgs
• Non-adiabatic quantum effects from a Standard Model time-dependent Higgs vev
• Cosmological implications of Higgs field fluctuations during inflation

Cited by in corpus (33)

• Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves
• Science with the space-based interferometer LISA. IV: Probing inflation with gravitational waves
• Challenges and Opportunities of Gravitational Wave Searches at MHz to GHz Frequencies
• Cosmology with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• The First Three Seconds: a Review of Possible Expansion Histories of the Early Universe
• Higgs Scalaron Mixed Inflation
• Gravitational waves from gauge preheating
• Constraining axion inflation with gravitational waves from preheating
• Constraining axion inflation with gravitational waves across 29 decades in frequency
• Gravitational wave production from preheating: parameter dependence
• Parametric Resonance in the Early Universe - A Fitting Analysis
• The Standard Model Higgs as the origin of the hot Big Bang
• Scalar correlation functions in de Sitter space from the stochastic spectral expansion
• Irreducible background of gravitational waves from a cosmic defect network: update and comparison of numerical techniques
• Anomalous non-conservation of fermion/chiral number in Abelian gauge theories at finite temperature
• What can we learn from the stochastic gravitational wave background produced by oscillons?
• Higgs-curvature coupling and post-inflationary vacuum instability
• Lattice implementation of Abelian gauge theories with Chern-Simons number and an axion field
• Oscillon formation during inflationary preheating with general relativity
• Constraining early dark energy with gravitational waves before recombination
• Challenges and Opportunities of Gravitational Wave Searches above 10 kHz
• FLRW cosmology with EDSFD parametrization
• Primordial Gravitational Waves with LISA
• The Higgs field and early universe cosmology: a (brief) review
• Lectures on Reheating after Inflation
• Primordial gravitational waves amplification from causal fluids
• Stochastic evolution of scalar fields with continuous symmetries during inflation
• Relativistic viscous effects on the primordial gravitational waves spectrum
• Chiral Gravitational Waves from Chiral Fermions
• Fast Likelihood-free Reconstruction of Gravitational Wave Backgrounds
• Present and future of CosmoLattice
• Group Theoretic Approach to Fermion Production
• Bridging inflation and reheating: chiral gravitational waves from aHz to GHz