Echo of the Dark: gravitational waves from dark SU(3) Yang-Mills theory

TL;DR

This paper models the confinement phase transition in a dark SU(3) Yang-Mills sector using holography to predict the resulting gravitational wave signal, providing a novel theoretical estimate aligned with lattice data.

Contribution

It introduces a holographic approach to estimate gravitational waves from dark sector phase transitions, matching lattice data for pure Yang-Mills theories.

Findings

Predicted gravitational wave signals from dark SU(3) Yang-Mills phase transition.

Derived effective action from holography with minimal errors.

First holographic computation aligned with lattice data for such signals.

Abstract

We analyze the phase transition in improved holographic QCD to obtain an estimate of the gravitational wave signal emitted in the confinement transition of a pure SU(3) Yang-Mills dark sector. We derive the effective action from holography and show that the energy budget and duration of the phase transition can be calculated with minor errors. These are used as input to obtain a prediction of the gravitational wave signal. To our knowledge, this is the first computation of the gravitational wave signal in a holographic model designated to match lattice data on the thermal properties of pure Yang-Mills.