Hearing the signal of dark sectors with gravitational wave detectors

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Motivated by advanced LIGO (aLIGO)'s recent discovery of gravitational waves, we discuss signatures of new physics that could be seen at ground-and space-based interferometers. We show that a first-order phase transition in a dark sector would lead to a detectable gravitational wave signal at future experiments, if the phase transition has occurred at temperatures few orders of magnitude higher than the electroweak scale. The source of gravitational waves in this case is associated with the dynamics of expanding and colliding bubbles in the early universe. At the same time we point out that topological defects, such as dark sector domain walls, may generate a detectable signal already at aLIGO. Both bubble and domain-wall scenarios are sourced by semiclassical configurations of a dark new physics sector. In the first case, the gravitational wave signal originates from bubble wall collisions and subsequent turbulence in hot plasma in the early universe, while the second case corresponds to domain walls passing through the interferometer at present and is not related to gravitational waves. We find that aLIGO at its current sensitivity can detect smoking-gun signatures from domain-wall interactions, while future proposed experiments including the fifth phase of aLIGO at design sensitivity can probe dark sector phase transitions.

Detecting gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions with LISA: an update

“…The possibility of detecting GWs from a PT in a dark sector was explored in [180] in models of composite dark sectors, and further explored in a variety of other DM scenarios in [69,[181][182][183][184][185][186][187][188][189][190][191][192]. While of course any hidden sector could be engineered to feature a cosmological PT, scenarios in which the PT serves a specific purpose can yield specific predictions for GW signals at LISA.…”

Gravitational waves from scale-invariant vector dark matter model: probing below the neutrino-floor

“…As we mentioned before, along the flat direction V tree = 0. Therefore, to find the true vacuum, one should find the minimum of the 1-loop potential (14), given by…”

“…Particularly, conformal DM models with Higgs portal are attractive because they can solve DM problem and at the same time can generate a strongly first order phase transition [8][9][10][11]. GWs due to first order phase transition have been studied within models where the scale-invariant symmetry is broken due to Coleman-Weinberg mechanism [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] or models with DM candidate [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. Conformal * a.mohamadnejad@ut.ac.ir symmetry also proposed as a possible solution for hierarchy problem [40].…”

Gravitational waves at aLIGO and vacuum stability with a scalar singlet extension of the standard model

“…[3,), which can be potentially constrained by the current and future GW observatories, such as the future space mission eLISA [47,48], and also possibly by aLIGO within the next 5 years [49]. Recently, it has been shown that these GW are detectable by BBO or DECIGO [50][51][52][53][54].…”