Holographic Bubbles with Jecco: Expanding, Collapsing and Critical

Abstract

Cosmological phase transitions can proceed via the nucleation of bubbles that subsequently expand and collide. The resulting gravitational wave spectrum depends crucially on the properties of these bubbles. We extend our previous holographic work on planar bubbles to circular bubbles in a strongly-coupled, non-Abelian, four-dimensional gauge theory. This extension brings about two new physical properties. First, the existence of a critical bubble, which we determine. Second, the bubble profile at late times exhibits a richer self-similar structure, which we verify. These results require a new 3+1 evolution code called Jecco that solves the Einstein equations in the characteristic formulation in asymptotically AdS spaces. Jecco is written in the Julia programming language and is freely available. We present an outline of the code and the tests performed to assess its robustness and performance.

A perfect fluid hydrodynamic picture of domain wall velocities at strong coupling

“…ii) We expect that it should be possible to generalize the results to systems with circular/spherical bubbles (c.f. holographic simulations in [29]). iii) We addressed pure gauge theories.…”

Droplet collapse during strongly supercooled transitions

“…With upcoming gravitational wave detectors like LISA offering enhanced observational prospects for cosmological gravitational wave backgrounds, there have been increased efforts to understand first-order phase transitions in precise detail. Recent years have seen advances in the determination of the asymptotic wall speed for expanding bubbles [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], more precise calculations of the thermodynamic phase transition parameters and nucleation rates [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], and refined baryogenesis computations [27][28][29][30][31]. Holographic techniques have been used to compute phase transition parameters and gravitational wave signals [12,16,[32][33][34][35].…”

“…Recent years have seen advances in the determination of the asymptotic wall speed for expanding bubbles [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16], more precise calculations of the thermodynamic phase transition parameters and nucleation rates [17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26], and refined baryogenesis computations [27][28][29][30][31]. Holographic techniques have been used to compute phase transition parameters and gravitational wave signals [12,16,[32][33][34][35]. Preliminary studies have explored the ability of LISA to reconstruct phase transition parameters [36,37].…”