Model-independent energy budget for LISA

TL;DR

This paper introduces a simple, model-independent method to calculate the kinetic energy fraction in gravitational waves from cosmological phase transitions, applicable to detonations, deflagrations, and hybrids, incorporating sound speed effects.

Contribution

It generalizes previous work by including deflagrations and hybrids, and provides a Python tool for practical calculations based on particle physics parameters.

Findings

The method accurately predicts kinetic energy fractions for different transition types.

Sound speed significantly influences the energy budget in deflagrations and hybrids.

Deviations in sound speed near the phase transition can be substantial in specific models.

Abstract

We provide an easy method to obtain the kinetic energy fraction in gravitational waves, generated during a cosmological first-order phase transition, as a function of only the wall velocity and quantities that can be determined from the particle physics model at the nucleation temperature. This generalizes recent work that achieved this goal for detonations. Here we present the corresponding results for deflagrations and hybrids. Unlike for detonations, the sound speed in the symmetric phase also enters the analysis. We perform a detailed comparison between our model-independent approach and other approaches in the literature. We provide a Python code snippet to determine the kinetic energy fraction $K$ as a function of the wall velocity, the two speeds of sound and the strength parameter of the phase transition. We also assess how realistic sizable deviations in speed of sound are close to the phase transition temperature in a specific model.