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Phase transitions in the early universe
by Mark Hindmarsh, Marvin Lüben, Johannes Lumma, Martin Pauly
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Submission summary
| Authors (as registered SciPost users): | Mark Hindmarsh · Marvin Lüben · Martin Pauly |
| Submission information | |
|---|---|
| Preprint Link: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.09136v3 (pdf) |
| Date accepted: | 2021-02-08 |
| Date submitted: | 2021-01-06 18:09 |
| Submitted by: | Pauly, Martin |
| Submitted to: | SciPost Physics Lecture Notes |
| Ontological classification | |
|---|---|
| Academic field: | Physics |
| Specialties: |
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| Approaches: | Theoretical, Computational, Phenomenological |
Abstract
These lecture notes are based on a course given by Mark Hindmarsh at the 24th Saalburg Summer School 2018 and written up by Marvin L\"uben, Johannes Lumma and Martin Pauly. The aim is to provide the necessary basics to understand first-order phase transitions in the early universe, to outline how they leave imprints in gravitational waves, and advertise how those gravitational waves could be detected in the future. A first-order phase transition at the electroweak scale is a prediction of many theories beyond the Standard Model, and is also motivated as an ingredient of some theories attempting to provide an explanation for the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our Universe. Starting from bosonic and fermionic statistics, we derive Boltzmann's equation and generalise to a fluid of particles with field dependent mass. We introduce the thermal effective potential for the field in its lowest order approximation, discuss the transition to the Higgs phase in the Standard Model and beyond, and compute the probability for the field to cross a potential barrier. After these preliminaries, we provide a hydrodynamical description of first-order phase transitions as it is appropriate for describing the early Universe. We thereby discuss the key quantities characterising a phase transition, and how they are imprinted in the gravitational wave power spectrum that might be detectable by the space-based gravitational wave detector LISA in the 2030s.
List of changes
We have addressed the helpful comments in the report of Referee 2, see the response to that report for more detail.
We have also corrected typos and added citations to other planned space-based detectors at the end of section 8.1. Further, we have extended the discussion of the fitting parameters by adding the new footnote 8 in section 8.2.
Published as SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 24 (2021)