Gravitational waves from Higgs domain walls

TL;DR

This paper investigates the production of gravitational waves from unstable Higgs domain walls formed due to the Standard Model Higgs potential with two quasi-degenerate vacua, and assesses their detectability.

Contribution

It provides an estimation of gravitational waves generated by unstable Higgs domain walls and discusses their potential observability with future gravitational wave detectors.

Findings

Unstable Higgs domain walls can produce significant gravitational waves.

The gravitational wave signals may be detectable by future experiments.

The study links Higgs potential features to observable gravitational wave signatures.

Abstract

The effective potential for the Standard Model Higgs field allows two quasi-degenerate vacua; one is our vacuum at the electroweak scale, while the other is at a much higher scale. The latter minimum may be at a scale much smaller than the Planck scale, if the potential is lifted by new physics. This gives rise to a possibility of domain wall formation after inflation. If the high-scale minimum is a local minimum, domain walls are unstable and disappear through violent annihilation processes, producing a significant amount of gravitational waves. We estimate the amount of gravitational waves produced from unstable domain walls in the Higgs potential and discuss detectability with future experiments.