Domain walls and gravitational waves in the Standard Model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the formation and decay of domain walls in the Standard Model at high energies, analyzing their potential gravitational wave signatures and concluding they are unlikely to be detectable with current technology.

Contribution

It provides a detailed numerical analysis of high-energy domain walls in the Standard Model and assesses their gravitational wave signals within standard cosmology.

Findings

Domain walls can form and percolate in the early universe.

Such domain walls decay rapidly and do not dominate the universe.

Gravitational waves from these domain walls are too weak to detect now.

Abstract

We study domain walls which can be created in the Standard Model under the assumption that it is valid up to very high energy scales. We focus on domain walls interpolating between the physical electroweak vacuum and the global minimum appearing at very high field strengths. The creation of the network which ends up in the electroweak vacuum percolating through the Universe is not as difficult to obtain as one may expect, although it requires certain tuning of initial conditions. Our numerical simulations confirm that such domain walls would swiftly decay and thus cannot dominate the Universe. We discuss the possibility of detection of gravitational waves produced in this scenario. We have found that for the standard cosmology the energy density of these gravitational waves is too small to be observed in present and planned detectors.