Spinodal Gravitational Waves

Abstract

We uncover a new gravitational-wave production mechanism in cosmological, first-order, thermal phase transitions. These are usually assumed to proceed via the nucleation of bubbles of the stable phase inside the metastable phase. However, if the nucleation rate is sufficiently suppressed, then the Universe may supercool all the way down the metastable branch and enter the spinodal region. In this case the transition proceeds via the exponential growth of unstable modes and the subsequent formation, merging and relaxation of phase domains. We use holography to follow the real-time evolution of this process in a strongly coupled, four-dimensional gauge theory. The resulting gravitational wave spectrum differs qualitatively from that in transitions mediated by bubble nucleation. We discuss the possibility that the spinodal dynamics may be preceded by a period of thermal inflation.

45 pages, 19 figures

References in corpus (43)

• Viscosity in Strongly Interacting Quantum Field Theories from Black Hole Physics
• The order of the quantum chromodynamics transition predicted by the standard model of particle physics
• Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update
• LHC Phenomenology of an Extended Standard Model with a Real Scalar Singlet
• Singlet Higgs Phenomenology and the Electroweak Phase Transition
• Challenges and Opportunities of Gravitational Wave Searches at MHz to GHz Frequencies
• Gravitational Waves From a Dark (Twin) Phase Transition
• First-Order Electroweak Phase Transition in the Standard Model with a Low Cutoff
• Mimicking the QCD equation of state with a dual black hole
• A Gravitational Wave Background from Reheating after Hybrid Inflation
• A strong electroweak phase transition in the 2HDM after LHC8
• Electroweak Baryogenesis: Concrete in a SUSY Model with a Gauge Singlet
• Testing the dark SU(N) Yang-Mills theory Confined Landscape: From the Lattice to Gravitational Waves
• Lattice study of an electroweak phase transition at m_h ~ 126 GeV
• Bubble Wall Velocity at Strong Coupling
• Holographic Collisions across a Phase Transition
• A holographic perspective on Gubser-Mitra conjecture
• Effective Field Theory and Electroweak Baryogenesis in the Singlet-Extended Standard Model
• Phase Transitions, Inhomogeneous Horizons and Second-Order Hydrodynamics
• Paths to equilibrium in non-conformal collisions
• Gravitational Waves from Dark Yang-Mills Sectors
• A Novel Formula for Bulk Viscosity from the Null Horizon Focusing Equation
• Scanning the skeleton of the 4D F-theory landscape
• Dark Holograms and Gravitational Waves
• ${\mathbb{P}}^1$-bundle bases and the prevalence of non-Higgsable structure in 4D F-theory models
• Real-Time dynamics and phase separation in a holographic first order phase transition
• Fate of false vacua in holographic first-order phase transitions
• A new dynamical instability in Anti-de-Sitter spacetime
• Holographic Collisions in Non-conformal Theories
• Holographic Bubbles with Jecco: Expanding, Collapsing and Critical
• Baryogenesis in the MSSM, nMSSM and NMSSM
• Dynamics of Phase Separation from Holography
• Crossing a large-$N$ phase transition at finite volume
• Gravitational Waves at Strong Coupling from an Effective Action
• Heating up Exotic RG Flows with Holography
• Holographic Evolution with Dynamical Boundary Gravity
• The String Soundscape at Gravitational Wave Detectors
• de Sitter Vacua of Strongly Interacting QFT
• Entanglement entropy in FRW backgrounds
• Entanglement entropy of $\mathcal{N}=2^{\ast }$ de Sitter vacuum
• Strong-coupling dynamics and entanglement in de Sitter space
• $\chi \mathrm{SB}$ of cascading gauge theory in de Sitter
• Domain Collisions

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves
• Stability of black holes with non-minimally coupled scalar hair to the Einstein tensor