Gravitational waves from supercooled phase transitions: dimensional transmutation meets dimensional reduction

Journal of High Energy Physics, vol. 2024

Abstract

A bstract Models with radiative symmetry breaking typically feature strongly supercooled first-order phase transitions, which result in an observable stochastic gravitational wave background. In this work, we analyse the role of higher-order thermal corrections for these transitions, applying high-temperature dimensional reduction to a theory with dimensional transmutation. In particular, we study to what extent high-temperature effective field theories (3D EFT) can be used. We find that despite significant supercooling down from the critical temperature, the high-temperature expansion for the bubble nucleation rate can be applied using the 3D EFT framework, and we point out challenges in the EFT description. We compare our findings to previous studies and find that the next-to-leading order corrections obtained in this work have a significant effect on the predictions for GW observables, motivating a further exploration of higher-order thermal effects.

Authors 4

1. Maciej Kierkla corresponding

   University of Warsaw

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Warsaw

   Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, ul. Pasteura 5, 02-093, Warsaw, Poland

2. Bogumiła Świeżewska

   University of Warsaw

   Affiliation as printed

   University of Warsaw

   Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw, ul. Pasteura 5, 02-093, Warsaw, Poland

3. Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen

   University of Helsinki · Stockholm University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Helsinki Institute of Physics · KTH Royal Institute of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Nordita, KTH Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University

   Shanghai Jiao Tong University

   University of Helsinki

   Department of Physics and Helsinki Institute of Physics, University of Helsinki, 10 P.O. Box 64, FI-00014, Helsinki, Finland

4. Jorinde van de Vis Aachen

   Leiden University · Utrecht University

   Affiliation as printed

   Leiden University

   Utrecht University

   Institute for Theoretical Physics, Utrecht University, Princetonplein 5, 3584 CC, Utrecht, The Netherlands