Gravitational waves from dark Yang-Mills sectors

Abstract

Dark Yang-Mills sectors, which are ubiquitous in the string landscape, may be reheated above their critical temperature and subsequently go through a confining first-order phase transition that produces stochastic gravitational waves in the early universe. Taking into account constraints from lattice and from Yang-Mills (center and Weyl) symmetries, we use a phenomenological model to construct an effective potential of the semi quark-gluon plasma phase, from which we compute the gravitational wave signal produced during confinement for numerous gauge groups. The signal is maximized when the dark sector dominates the energy density of the universe at the time of the phase transition. In that case, we find that it is within reach of the next-to-next generation of experiments (BBO, DECIGO) for a range of dark confinement scales near the weak scale.

Dark confinement and chiral phase transitions: gravitational waves vs matter representations

“…For previous works and complementary approaches on chiral and confinement phase transitions see e.g. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28]. We highlight below the main findings of our work:…”

Dark confinement-deconfinement phase transition: a roadmap from Polyakov loop models to gravitational waves

“…This tendency is still operative even starting from N = 3. This decreasing β in N is a characteristic feature of our PLM, which is compared to the PT nature predicted from the matrix model [37] exhibiting a growing scaling of the β in N for N > 4, but a decreasing scaling for N < 4. At N = 4 the parameters α and β have the same order of magnitude for both the matrix model and ours, so both models coincide at this N = 4 and GW signals do as well.…”

“…This feature has been pointed out in refs. [37,49], but we would like to stress that the value of N m depends on the model. For the model in ref.…”

“…[49], N m = 6, while N m = 4 in ref. [37] which adopts a very different model, the matrix model. In our model, we find that N m = 7(9) for the 4 − 6(8) PLM; see table.…”

“…Very recently, ref. [37] appeared which studies GWs from the PYM sector following the matrixmodel approach. 4 Though there are several models in the ballpark, it is still unclear how to realize the FOPT of the confinement-deconfinement for a generic N , consistently with the large Nthermodynamic feature relevant to the GW spectral predictions.…”