Anisotropic gravitational waves induced by hypermagnetic fields during the electroweak phase transition epoch

TL;DR

This paper investigates how primordial hypermagnetic fields during the electroweak phase transition can induce anisotropies in gravitational waves, potentially serving as a new probe of early universe magnetic fields.

Contribution

It introduces a model combining the standard model with a scalar field to analyze hypermagnetic field effects on gravitational wave anisotropies during the electroweak transition.

Findings

Hypermagnetic fields can increase the Euclidean action and lower nucleation temperature.

Hypermagnetic fields enhance gravitational wave production during the phase transition.

Anisotropies in gravitational waves can be significantly larger than Sachs-Wolfe effects.

Abstract

We study the anisotropies of gravitational waves induced by weak hypermagnetic fields which are randomly distributed and oriented during the electroweak phase transition in the early universe. The theory setup of this study is the standard model plus a real singlet scalar field, which can produce the needed strongly first order electroweak phase transition. Then we investigate how the hypermagnetic fields can convert to magnetic fields and we compute the departure of energy difference between the symmetric phase and the broken phase when the magnetic fields are turned on. It is found that the presence of the hypermagnetic fields can increase the Euclidean action, thus can decrease nucleation temperature, which can lead to a supercool plasma. We point out that the hypermagnetic field can enhance the gravitational wave production from a first order electroweak phase transition and the inhomogeneity of primordial hypermagnetic field can lead to anisotropies of gravitational waves. By examining three well-motivated distribution of hypermagnetic fields, we calculate the corresponding angular power spectra of stochastic gravitational wave background and find they can be significantly larger than the contributions of the Sachs-Wolfe effects and integrated Sachs-Wolfe effects. Our results show that the anisotropies of gravitational wave could provide a novel probe to the primordial hypermagnetic field in the electroweak phase transition epoch.