Gravitational wave background from Standard Model physics: Complete leading order

2020/04/23 by J. Ghiglieri, G. Jackson, M. Laine +1 · 1 voice · 15 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Particle physics theoretical and experimental studies #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/jhep07(2020)092

published as JHEP 07 (2020) 092 · 33 pages. v2: clarifications and an ancillary data file added

openalex created_date 2020/05/01 · openalex publication_date 2020/07/01 · arxiv created 2020/07/17 · arxiv updated 2020/07/20 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

We compute the production rate of the energy density carried by gravitational waves emitted by a Standard Model plasma in thermal equilibrium, consistently to leading order in coupling constants for momenta k∼ πT. Summing up the contributions from the full history of the universe, the highest temperature of the radiation epoch can be constrained by the so-called N_{\rm eff} parameter. The current theoretical uncertainty ΔN_{\rm eff} ≤ 10^-3 corresponds to T_{\rm max} ≤ 2× 10¹⁷ GeV. In the course of the computation, we show how a subpart of the production rate can be determined with the help of standard packages, even if subsequently an IR subtraction and thermal resummation need to be implemented.

Citations

• Standard Model thermodynamics across the electroweak crossover
• FeynRules 2.0 — A complete toolbox for tree-level phenomenology

Cited by

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Discussions

• If you don’t have an inflaton, you can still source a primordial stochastic GW background via causal stress energy in the early plasma or maybe via nonlinear mode coupling. These are the non inflation [stackexchange, 6 points]

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