Domain Walls in $A_4$ Flavour Models

Abstract

The spontaneous breaking of an $A_4$ flavour symmetry, often used to predict leptonic mixing, can lead to the formation of domain walls which can annihilate and generate a stochastic gravitational wave background. We study this phenomenon in three scenarios where the nature of the scalar field responsible for breaking the $A_4$ symmetry spontaneously differs: real, complex, and supersymmetric. For the real scalar, a biased potential produces metastable walls that decay into oscillating two-wall systems with important consequences for gravitational wave signals. In the complex scalar case, we discuss the interplay between domain walls and global strings and classify the types of domain walls that form in terms of the $A_4$ group symmetries. We investigate the properties of supersymmetric $A_4$ domain walls, and highlight the BPS walls. Finally we show how these results may be achieved in leptonic $A_4$ flavour models, with and without supersymmetry, and discuss their distinctive gravitational wave signatures.