Browsing by Subject "gravitational waves"
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(2024)Gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions are a promising probe of the early universe. Many theories beyond the Standard Model predict the early universe to have undergone a cosmological first-order phase transition at the electroweak scale. This transition would have produced gravitational waves potentially detectable with the future space-based detector Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). We study the gravitational wave power spectrum generated by sound waves, which are a dominant source of gravitational waves from first-order phase transitions. We compare two methods for calculating the sound wave power spectrum: a simulation-motivated broken power-law fit of the shape of the spectrum, and a wider theoretical framework called the Sound Shell Model, which includes hydrodynamic calculations of the phase transition. We present an implementation of the Sound Shell Model into the PTPlot tool, which is currently based on the broken power-law fit. With PTPlot, we calculate the signal-to-noise ratios of LISA for the sound wave power spectrum of each method. The signal-to-noise ratio allows us to estimate the detectability of gravitational wave signals with LISA. We analyse how the detectability of certain particle physics models changes between the two different methods. Our results show that the Sound Shell Model has a potentially significant impact on the signal-to-noise ratio predictions, but it does not uniformly improve or worsen the detectability of the gravitational wave signals compared to the broken power law. The code implementation is overall successful and lays the foundation for an updated release of PTPlot and future work within this topic.
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(2023)Gravitational waves predicted by the theory of general relativity are providing us with an opportunity to study cosmological processes well beyond the horizon for electromagnetic observations. One such process is a first-order phase transition as the universe cools down, which could generate gravitational waves observable in the millihertz range today. The upcoming Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a space-based gravitational wave observatory with peak sensitivity in the millihertz range, so it has the potential to observe a sufficiently strong phase transition signal. The LISA Consortium have developed the LISA simulation pipeline for the purposes of creating mock data, which can then be used to test data analysis methods in preparation for the real LISA data analysis. Our aim is to first test the simulation pipeline by injecting a phase transition signal, with added instrument noises and galactic binary confusion noise, which we expect to be present in the real observations as well. Second, we will attempt to recover the injected signal to see whether it is detectable based on the deviance information criterion (DIC). We will do this for 25 different parameter combinations in order to chart the detectability of signals from different phase transition scenarios. Our results show better detectability for phase transition signals with higher amplitudes and frequencies centered around the mHz range, which is where the expected peak sensitivity of LISA lies. The confusion noise appears to be less of a distraction to our observations than the instrument noises, which set limits in the extremes of the LISA frequency range.
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(2022)The primordial perturbations created by inflation in the early Universe are known to be able to produce significant amount of primordial black holes and gravitational waves with large amplitudes in some inflationary models. Primordial black holes are produced by primordial scalar perturbations and gravitational waves are partly primordial tensor perturbations and partly produced by scalar perturbations. In this thesis we review some of the current literature on the subject and discuss a few inflationary models that are capable of producing primordial scalar perturbations large enough to create a significant amount of primordial black holes. The main focus is on ultra-slow roll inflation with a concrete example potential illustrating the dynamics of the scenario followed by a briefer treatment of some of the alternative models. We start by explaining the necessary background theory for the understanding of the subject at hand. Then we move on to the inflationary models covered in this thesis. After that we explain the production of the primordial black holes and gravitational waves from scalar perturbations. Then we consider primordial black holes as a dark matter candidate and go through the most significant known restrictions on the existence of primordial black holes with different masses. We discuss some of the possible future constraints for the remaining possible mass window for which primordial black holes could explain all of dark matter. We then briefly discuss two planned space-based gravitational wave detectors that may be able to detect gravitational waves created by inflation.
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(2020)First order electroweak phase transitions (EWPTs) are an attractive area of research. This is mainly due to two reasons. First, they contain aspects that could help to explain the observed baryon asymmetry. Secondly, strong first order PTs could produce gravitational waves (GWs) that could be detectable by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a future space-based GW detector. However, the electroweak PT in the Standard Model (SM) is not a first order transition but a crossover. In so-called beyond the SM theories the first order transitions are possible. To investigate the possibility of an EWPT and the detection by LISA, we must be able to parametrise the nature of the PT accurately. We are interested in the calculation of the bubble nucleation rate because it can be used to estimate the properties of the possible GW signal, such as the duration of the PT. The nucleation rate essentially quantifies how likely it is for a point in space to tunnel from one phase to the other. The calculation can be done either using perturbation theory or simulations. Perturbative approaches however suffer from the so-called infrared problem and are not free of theoretical uncertainty. We need to perform a nonperturbative calculation so that we can determine the nucleation rate accurately and test the results of perturbation theory. In this thesis, we will explain the steps that go into a nonperturbative calculation of the bubble nucleation rate. We perform the calculation on the cubic anisotropy model, a theory with two scalar fields. This toy model is one of the simplest in which a radiatively induced transition occurs. We present preliminary results on the nucleation rate and compare it with the thin-wall approximation.
Now showing items 1-4 of 4