Freezing-In Gravitational Waves

Abstract

The thermal plasma in the early universe produced a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background, which peaks today in the microwave regime and was dubbed the cosmic gravitational microwave background (CGMB). In previous works only single graviton production processes that contribute to the CGMB have been considered. Here we also investigate graviton pair production processes and show that these can lead to a significant contribution if the ratio between the maximum temperature and the Planck mass, $T_{\max }/m_{\mathrm{p}}$, divided by the internal coupling in the heat bath is large enough. As the dark matter freeze-in production mechanism is conceptually very similar to the GW production mechanism from the primordial thermal plasma, we refer to the latter as ``GW freeze-in production''. We show that quantum gravity effects appear in single graviton production and are smaller by a factor $(T_{\max }/m_{\mathrm{p}}{)}^2$ than the leading order contribution. In our work we explicitly compute the CGMB spectrum within a scalar model with quartic interaction.

18 pages, 6 figures (matches version published in Phys. Rev. D)

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