2012/12/31 by Daniel G. Figueroa, Mark Hindmarsh, Jon Urrestilla +3 · 5 citations
Agricultural and Biological Sciences · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Scientific Research Methods #Asthma #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #COSMIC cancer database #Classical mechanics #Cosmic string #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Geometry #Gravitation #Gravitational wave #Healthcare Systems and Public Health #Internal medicine #Invariant (physics) #Mathematical physics #Medicine #Phase transition #Physical examination #Physical therapy #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Scalar (mathematics) #Scalar field #Scale invariance #Scaling #Spectral density #Surgery #Topological defect #Universe #astro-ph.CO #hep-ph #hep-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.110.101302
published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 101302 (2013) · 5 pages, 2 figures; minor changes, matches version to be published in PRL
openalex publication_date 2013/01/01 · arxiv created 2013/02/28 · arxiv updated 2013/03/13 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/24
We demonstrate that any scaling source in the radiation era produces a background of gravitational waves with an exact scale-invariant power spectrum. Cosmic defects, created after a phase transition in the early universe, are such a scaling source. We emphasize that the result is independent of the topology of the cosmic defects, the order of phase transition, and the nature of the symmetry broken, global or gauged. As an example, using large-scale numerical simulations, we calculate the scale-invariant gravitational wave power spectrum generated by the dynamics of a global O(N) scalar theory. The result approaches the large N theoretical prediction as N(-2), albeit with a large coefficient. The signal from global cosmic strings is O(100) times larger than the large N prediction.