SMEFT effects on gravitational wave spectrum from electroweak phase transition

TL;DR

This paper investigates how SMEFT dimension-six operators influence the gravitational wave spectrum from the electroweak phase transition, highlighting potential detectability by future observations and collider experiments.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of SMEFT effects on the Higgs potential and their impact on gravitational wave signals, including tree-level and loop-level contributions.

Findings

Future gravitational wave detectors can probe SMEFT effects on the Higgs potential.

Sensitivity to wave function renormalization and top-quark loop effects is significant.

Comparison with collider sensitivities shows complementary discovery potential.

Abstract

Future gravitational wave observations are potentially sensitive to new physics corrections to the Higgs potential once the first-order electroweak phase transition arises. We study the SMEFT dimension-six operator effects on the Higgs potential, where three types of effects are taken into account: (i) SMEFT tree level effect on $\varphi^6$ operator, (ii) SMEFT tree level effect on the wave function renormalization of the Higgs field, and (iii) SMEFT top-quark one-loop level effect. The sensitivity of future gravitational wave observations to these effects is numerically calculated by performing a Fisher matrix analysis. We find that the future gravitational wave observations can be sensitive to (ii) and (iii) once the first-order electroweak phase transition arises from (i). The dimension-eight $\varphi^8$ operator effects on the first-order electroweak phase transition are also discussed. The sensitivities of the future gravitational wave observations are also compared with those of future collider experiments.