Gravitational waves from colliding vacuum bubbles in gauge theories

Abstract

We study production of gravitational waves (GWs) in strongly supercooled cosmological phase transitions in gauge theories. We extract from two-bubble lattice simulations the scaling of the GW source, and use it in many-bubble simulations in the thin-wall limit to estimate the resulting GW spectrum. We find that in presence of the gauge field the GW source decays with bubble radius as $\propto R^{-3}$ after collisions. This leads to a GW spectrum that follows $\Omega_{\rm GW} \propto \omega^{2.3}$ at low frequencies and $\Omega_{\rm GW} \propto \omega^{-2.4}$ at high frequencies, marking a significant deviation from the popular envelope approximation.