2023/07/06 by Xiu-Fei Li, Li, Xiu-Fei · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #Dark Matter and Cosmic Phenomena #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2307.03163
openalex publication_date 2023/07/06 · openalex created_date 2023/07/08 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The symmetry can be broken at high temperature and then restored at low temperature, which is the so-called high temperature symmetry breaking. It often appears in some theories such as the high scale electroweak baryogenesis mechanism. In this paper, we probe the high temperature ℤ2 symmetry breaking with gravitational waves (GWs) from domain wall annihilation. We first introduce a scalar with ℤ2 symmetry and few of singlet fermions that interact with scalar through a five-dimension operator. This can lead to the scalar potential has a non-zero minimum at high temperature. At the early stage, the scalar is pinned at symmetric phase due to the large Hubble fraction. When the scalar thermal mass becomes comparable to the Hubble parameter, it can quickly roll down to the minimum of potential. Then the ℤ2 symmetry is spontaneously broken and the domain walls will form. With the decrease of temperature, ℤ2 symmetry will be restored. We find that if domain walls are formed at O(109)~ \rm GeV, the GW produced by domain wall annihilation is expected to be observed by BBO, CE and ET. In addition, we also discuss the relationships between this scenario and NANOGrav signal.