Gravitational wave background from Standard Model physics: Complete leading order

2020/04/23 by J. Ghiglieri, G. Jackson, M. Laine +1 · 1 voice · 4 citations
#hep-ph #astro-ph.CO

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

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.

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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