Browsing by Subject "sound shell model"

Cosmological first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) are a hypothetical scenario occurring in the early universe in which bubbles nucleate and expand, generating gravitational waves (GWs). These transitions interest scientists due to their occurrence in extensions to the Standard Model of particle physics, their potential for providing insight into open questions in particle physics and cosmology, and the possibility of observing their signature with the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). Modeling GW production from FOPTs is thus a topic of active research. In FOPT models, GW production is split into three sources: collisions between bubble walls Ωenv, overlapping fluid shells Ωsw, and fluid turbulence Ωturb. When modeling the contribution from Ωsw in 1D spherical simulations, a sound shell model is often employed which assumes that fluid shells reach a calculable self-similar state of expansion before overlapping. In this thesis, I determine when this asymptotic expansion state is reached by defining and calculating a relaxation time ts and transition rate βs for 1D expanding fluid shells. I model two scenarios, a thin and a thick-walled perturbed nucleation bubble expanding in a relativistic fluid, in the limit of fast detonations and weak coupling. In each case, respectively, relaxation temperature and transition rate are determined to be: tsTc = 7.422(21) × 103, βs/Tc = 1.3474(38) × 10−4; and tsTc = 9.901(33) × 105, βs/Tc = 1.011(35) × 10−5. When fixing the critical temperature Tc below which bubbles can nucleate, these results predict that when the transition rate β > βs, the GW spectrum produced assuming relaxed fluid shells may be inaccurate. In addition to this main result, I also compare various methods for estimating bubble wall expansion velocity. These results are useful for 3D simulations, in which direct methods for determining wall velocity are unwieldy.