Peccei-Quinn Phase Transition at LIGO

Abstract

The LIGO observatories can potentially detect stochastic gravitational waves arising from phase transitions which happened in the early universe at temperatures around $T\sim 10^8$ GeV. This provides an extraordinary opportunity for discovering the phase transition associated with the breaking of the Peccei-Quinn symmetry, required in QCD axion models. Here we consider the simplest Peccei-Quinn models and study under which conditions a strong first-order phase transition can occur, analyzing its associated gravitational wave signal. To be detectable at LIGO, we show that some supercooling is needed, which can arise either in Coleman-Weinberg-type symmetry breaking or in strongly-coupled models. We also investigate phase transitions that interestingly proceed by first breaking the electroweak symmetry at large scales before tunneling to the Peccei-Quinn breaking vacuum. In this case, the associated gravitational wave signal is more likely to be probed at the proposed Einstein Telescope.

27 pages, 7 figure. v2: references added

References in corpus (28)

• Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational Radiation from First-Order Phase Transitions
• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update
• Energy Budget of Cosmological First-order Phase Transitions
• The Effective Potential and First-Order Phase Transitions: Beyond Leading Order
• Detector configuration of DECIGO/BBO and identification of cosmological neutron-star binaries
• Gravitational Waves from Phase Transitions at the Electroweak Scale and Beyond
• Resummation in a Hot Scalar Field Theory
• Gravitational wave energy budget in strongly supercooled phase transitions
• Electroweak Bubble Wall Speed Limit
• Can electroweak bubble walls run away?
• Gravitational Waves from Warped Spacetime
• A review of gravitational waves from cosmic domain walls
• Holography and the Electroweak Phase Transition
• Cosmological Consequences of Nearly Conformal Dynamics at the TeV scale
• New constraints on primordial gravitational waves from Planck 2015
• QCD-induced Electroweak Phase Transition
• Gravitational Waves from Supercool Axions
• Gravitational Waves from First-Order Phase Transitions: LIGO as a Window to Unexplored Seesaw Scales
• The Supercooled Universe
• A QCD Axion from Higher Dimensional Gauge Field
• Efficient numerical solution to vacuum decay with many fields
• A fresh look at the gravitational-wave signal from cosmological phase transitions
• Warped Axions
• A Holographic Perspective on the Axion Quality Problem
• Holographic conformal transition and light scalars
• Cosmologically safe QCD axion as a present from extra dimension
• The Holographic QCD Axion

Cited by in corpus (66)

• Upper Limits on the Isotropic Gravitational-Wave Background from Advanced LIGO's and Advanced Virgo's Third Observing Run
• New Sensitivity Curves for Gravitational-Wave Signals from Cosmological Phase Transitions
• Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves
• Gravitational waves from first-order cosmological phase transitions: lifetime of the sound wave source
• Beyond the Standard Models with Cosmic Strings
• Updated predictions for gravitational waves produced in a strongly supercooled phase transition
• Friction pressure on relativistic bubble walls
• Search for anisotropic gravitational-wave backgrounds using data from Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo's first three observing runs
• Detection of Early-Universe Gravitational Wave Signatures and Fundamental Physics
• Electroweak bubble wall expansion: gravitational waves and baryogenesis in Standard Model-like thermal plasma
• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• Gravitational waves from bubble collisions and fluid motion in strongly supercooled phase transitions
• String Fragmentation in Supercooled Confinement and Implications for Dark Matter
• Supercooling in Radiative Symmetry Breaking: Theory Extensions, Gravitational Wave Detection and Primordial Black Holes
• The Scalar Singlet Extension of the Standard Model: Gravitational Waves versus Baryogenesis
• Supercool Composite Dark Matter Beyond 100 TeV
• Bubble Wall Velocity at Strong Coupling
• Implications for First-Order Cosmological Phase Transitions from the Third LIGO-Virgo Observing Run
• Ultra-relativistic bubbles from the simplest Higgs portal and their cosmological consequences
• Gravitational Waves from Fundamental Axion Dynamics
• Simultaneous estimation of astrophysical and cosmological stochastic gravitational-wave backgrounds with terrestrial detectors
• Dark Holograms and Gravitational Waves
• Dimensional Transmutation in Gravity and Cosmology
• Implications of Gravitational-wave Production from Dark Photon Resonance to Pulsar-timing Observations and Effective Number of Relativistic Species
• Ultrahigh frequency primordial gravitational waves beyond the kHz: The case of cosmic strings
• Escape from supercooling with or without bubbles: gravitational wave signatures
• Baryon and Lepton Number Violation from Gravitational Waves
• Testing clockwork axion with gravitational waves
• Audible Axions with a Booster: Stochastic Gravitational Waves from Rotating ALPs
• Recipes for Oscillon Longevity
• High Quality QCD Axion at Gravitational Wave Observatories
• Gravitational waves from a holographic phase transition
• Detecting cosmological gravitational waves background after removal of compact binary coalescences in future gravitational wave detectors
• Probing Early Universe Supercooled Phase Transitions with Gravitational Wave Data
• Heavy QCD axion model in light of pulsar timing arrays
• Gravitational Waves from an Axion-Dark Photon System: A Lattice Study
• Model-Independent Radiative Symmetry Breaking and Gravitational Waves
• Bounds on the bubble wall velocity
• Filtered asymmetric dark matter during the Peccei-Quinn phase transition
• Gravitational Wave Signatures of Lepton Universality Violation
• Slaying Axion-Like Particles via Gravitational Waves and Primordial Black Holes from Supercooled Phase Transition
• Upper limits on the Polarized Isotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background from Advanced LIGO-Virgo's First Three Observing Runs
• Detecting circular polarisation in the stochastic gravitational-wave background from a first-order cosmological phase transition
• The hydrodynamics of inverse phase transitions
• Upper limits on persistent gravitational waves using folded data and the full covariance matrix from Advanced LIGO${}^{\prime }$s first two observing runs
• Angular Resolution of the Search for Anisotropic Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background with Terrestrial Gravitational-Wave Detectors
• Bubbletrons: Ultrahigh-Energy Particle Collisions and Heavy Dark Matter at Phase Transitions
• Black holes and gravitational waves from phase transitions in realistic models
• Testing Unification and Dark Matter with Gravitational Waves
• A Common Origin for the QCD Axion and Sterile Neutrinos from $SU(5)$ Strong Dynamics
• Primordial Black Holes (as Dark Matter) from the Supercooled Phase Transitions with Radiative Symmetry Breaking
• Bayesian parameter estimation for targeted anisotropic gravitational-wave background
• Asymmetric Dark Matter from Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational Wave Signatures of Gauged Baryon and Lepton Number
• Probing intermediate scale Froggatt-Nielsen models at future gravitational wave observatories
• Inverse bubbles from broken supersymmetry
• Hearing Higgs with Gravitational Wave Detectors
• Shedding Light on Dark Sectors with Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational waves from patterns of electroweak symmetry breaking: an effective perspective
• The constraints on the stochastic gravitational wave background from cosmic strings by an electromagnetic resonance system
• Reheating after the Supercooled Phase Transitions with Radiative Symmetry Breaking
• Baryogenesis via relativistic bubble walls
• Detectability of the Phase Transition Gravitational Waves in the DFSZ axion Model
• Probing the Neutrino Seesaw Scale with Gravitational Waves
• Gravitational waves from the sound shell model: direct and inverse phase transitions in the early Universe
• Cosmology of the companion-axion model: dark matter, gravitational waves, and primordial black holes