Cosmological phase transitions: from particle physics to gravitational waves, semi-analytically

Abstract

Motivated by the recent evidence of a stochastic gravitational wave background found by pulsar timing array experiments, we focus on one of the prime cosmological explanations, i.e. a supercooled first order phase transition. If confirmed, it would offer a unique opportunity to probe early Universe dynamics and the related physics beyond the Standard Model of particles and interactions. However, the prediction of the gravitational wave spectrum from a given particle physics scenario requires theoretically and computationally demanding methods. While several tools have been put forward to reduce uncertainties and automatize these computations, we study here the possibility to perform the full pipeline of computations semi-analytically in the $4D$ theory for a $U(1)^\prime$ conformal extension of the Standard Model, thus avoiding computationally intensive simulations. Our approach yields accurate results that can be used in phenomenological studies and allow for an efficient exploration of the connection between the particle physics models and their cosmological predictions.