Effective actions and bubble nucleation from holography

TL;DR

This paper uses holographic duality to compute the quantum effective action of strongly interacting theories, enabling analysis of first order phase transitions and gravitational wave signals through a simple gravity model.

Contribution

Introduces a simple holographic model with a scalar field to study phase transitions and bubble nucleation, linking effective action scaling to gravitational wave parameters.

Findings

Effective action computed from black brane solutions.

Constructed bubble and domain wall solutions.

Linked effective degrees of freedom to gravitational wave signals.

Abstract

We discuss the computation of the quantum effective action of strongly interacting field theories using holographic duality, and its use to determine quasi-equilibrium parameters of first order phase transitions relevant for gravitational wave production. A particularly simple holographic model is introduced, containing only the metric and a free massive scalar field. Despite the simplicity, the model contains a rich phase diagram, including first order phase transitions at non-zero temperature, due to various multi-trace deformations. We obtain the leading terms in the effective action from homogeneous black brane solutions in the gravity dual, and linearised perturbations around them. We then employ the effective action to construct bubble and domain wall solutions in the field theory side and study their properties. In particular, we show how the scaling of the effective action with the effective number of degrees of freedom of the quantum field theory determines the corresponding scaling of gravitational wave parameters.