Update on gravitational wave signals from post-inflationary phase transitions

Abstract

In view of recent interest in high-frequency detectors, broad features of gravitational wave signals from phase transitions taking place soon after inflation are summarized. The influence of the matter domination era that follows the slow-roll stage is quantified in terms of two equilibration rates. Turning to the highest-frequency part of the spectrum, we show how it is constrained by the fact that the bubble distance scale must exceed the mean free path.

12 pages. v2: minor fixes and clarifications

References in corpus (6)

• Gravitational Waves from Phase Transitions at the Electroweak Scale and Beyond
• Gravitational Waves as a Big Bang Thermometer
• Gravitational wave background from non-Abelian reheating after axion-like inflation
• Gravitational wave background from vacuum and thermal fluctuations during axion-like inflation
• Gravitational-wave signatures from reheating
• Maximal temperature of strongly-coupled dark sectors

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Lunar Gravitational-wave Antenna: Mission Studies and Science Case
• Double-graviton production from Standard Model plasma
• The hydrodynamics of inverse phase transitions
• Thermal evolution of dark matter and gravitational-wave production in the early universe from a symplectic glueball model
• Super-heated first order phase transitions