NANOGrav Signal from the End of Inflation and the LIGO Mass and Heavier Primordial Black Holes

TL;DR

This paper explores how a first-order phase transition at the end of a specific inflationary model could produce a gravitational wave background matching NANOGrav's recent detection, also forming primordial black holes of LIGO's mass scale.

Contribution

It demonstrates that a first-order phase transition during double-field inflation can generate a gravitational wave spectrum consistent with NANOGrav's observations and produce primordial black holes of LIGO mass.

Findings

First-order phase transition is necessary for matching NANOGrav signal.

The gravitational wave amplitude remains constant at certain preheating scales.

Lowering preheating scale below a threshold affects the gravitational wave amplitude.

Abstract

Releasing the 12.5-year pulsar timing array data, the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) has recently reported the evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum which would herald the detection of a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) for the first time. We investigate if the signal could be generated from the end of a $\sim 10$ MeV but still phenomenologically viable double-field inflation when the field configuration settles to its true vacuum. During the double-field inflation at such scales, bubbles of true vacuum that can collapse to LIGO mass and heavier primordial black holes form. We show that only when this process happens with a first-order phase transition, the produced gravitational wave spectrum can match with the NANOGrav acclaimed SGWB signal. We show that the produced gravitational wave spectrum matches the NANOGrav SGWB signal only when this process happens through a first-order phase transition. Using LATTICEEASY, we also examine the previous observation in the literature that by lowering the scale of preheating, despite the shift of the peak frequency of the gravitational wave profile to smaller values, the amplitude of the SGWB could be kept almost constant. We notice that this observation breaks down at the preheating scale, $M\lesssim 10^{-14}~m_{{}_{\rm Pl}}$.