Gravitational Waves from Dark Yang-Mills Sectors

TL;DR

This paper investigates gravitational waves generated by first-order phase transitions in dark Yang-Mills sectors, showing potential detectability by future gravitational wave observatories for certain dark confinement scales.

Contribution

It introduces a phenomenological model to compute gravitational wave signals from dark Yang-Mills sectors, incorporating lattice and symmetry constraints, and assesses their observability.

Findings

Gravitational wave signals can be within reach of future detectors like BBO and DECIGO.

The signal strength peaks when the dark sector dominates the universe's energy density during the phase transition.

Detectability depends on the dark confinement scale, especially near the weak scale.

Abstract

Dark Yang-Mills sectors, which are ubiquitous in the string landscape, may be reheated above their critical temperature and subsequently go through a confining first-order phase transition that produces stochastic gravitational waves in the early universe. Taking into account constraints from lattice and from Yang-Mills (center and Weyl) symmetries, we use a phenomenological model to construct an effective potential of the semi quark-gluon plasma phase, from which we compute the gravitational wave signal produced during confinement for numerous gauge groups. The signal is maximized when the dark sector dominates the energy density of the universe at the time of the phase transition. In that case, we find that it is within reach of the next-to-next generation of experiments (BBO, DECIGO) for a range of dark confinement scales near the weak scale.