Relic Gravitational Waves from the Chiral Plasma Instability in the Standard Cosmological Model

Abstract

In the primordial plasma, at temperatures above the scale of electroweak symmetry breaking, the presence of chiral asymmetries is expected to induce the development of helical hypermagnetic fields through the phenomenon of chiral plasma instability. It results in magnetohydrodynamic turbulence due to the high conductivity and low viscosity and sources gravitational waves that survive in the universe today as a stochastic polarized gravitational wave background. In this article, we show that this scenario only relies on Standard Model physics, and therefore the observable signatures, namely the relic magnetic field and gravitational background, are linked to a single parameter controlling the initial chiral asymmetry. We estimate the magnetic field and gravitational wave spectra, and validate these estimates with 3D numerical simulations.

8 pages, 4 figures, 1 table; v2 updated to match published version, results unchanged and PRD accepted; v3: fixed broken reference link

References in corpus (18)

• Search for an isotropic gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• Searching for the nano-Hertz stochastic gravitational wave background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I
• The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array III. Search for gravitational wave signals
• The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Search for Signals from New Physics
• The Spectrum of Gravitational Radiation from Primordial Turbulence
• Baryogenesis from Decaying Magnetic Helicity
• The MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array: First Data Release
• Evolution of the Baryon Asymmetry through the Electroweak Crossover in the Presence of a Helical Magnetic Field
• The turbulent chiral-magnetic cascade in the early universe
• Long-range magnetic fields in the ground state of the Standard Model plasma
• Chiral effects in astrophysics and cosmology
• Relic gravitational waves from the chiral magnetic effect
• Nanohertz Gravitational Wave Astronomy during the SKA Era: An InPTA perspective
• A new constraint on primordial lepton flavour asymmetries
• Decay law of magnetic turbulence with helicity balanced by chiral fermions
• Chiral magnetohydrodynamics with zero total chirality
• Low frequency tail of gravitational wave spectra from hydromagnetic turbulence
• Cosmological Magnetic Field and Dark Energy as two sides of the same coin

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Chiral Magnetic Effect in Heavy Ion Collisions: The Present and Future
• Primordial magnetic field from chiral plasma instability with sourcing
• Efficiency of dynamos from an autonomous generation of chiral asymmetry