2025/02/17 by James M. Cline, Cline, James M., Benoı̂t Laurent +1 · 4 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO) #FOS: Physical sciences #General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc) #High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph) #High-Energy Particle Collisions Research #Physics of Superconductivity and Magnetism #Quantum Chromodynamics and Particle Interactions
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2502.12321
openalex publication_date 2025/02/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Although the QCD phase transition is a crossover in the standard model, nonstandard effects such as a large lepton asymmetry are known to make it first order, with possible applications to gravitational wave production. This process is sensitive to the speed of the bubble walls during the phase transition, which is difficult to compute from first principles. We take advantage of recent progress on wall speed determinations to provide a simple estimate valid in the small supercooling regime which constrains the wall speed to be significantly lower than what has been used in previous literature. This in turn strongly suppresses the production of gravitational waves, to a level that is just out of reach of the most sensitive projected experiment for this signal, μAres. While our analysis approximates the equation of state using the template model, we demonstrate that our conclusions remain robust when incorporating state-of-the-art QCD equation of state data.