On Particle Production from Phase Transition Bubbles

TL;DR

This paper improves numerical analysis and provides analytic formulas for particle production during first order phase transitions, revealing new qualitative insights in more realistic cosmological models.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed numerical study and simple analytic formulas for particle production during FOPTs in realistic frameworks.

Findings

Numerical results show significant particle production effects.

Analytic formulas enable easier calculations in various models.

Qualitative details previously overlooked are now clarified.

Abstract

While first order phase transitions (FOPTs) have been extensively studied as promising cosmological sources of gravitational waves, the phenomenon of particle production from the dynamics of the background field during FOPTs has received relatively little attention in the literature, where it has only been studied with semi-analytic estimates in some simplified settings. This paper provides improved numerical studies of this effect in more realistic frameworks, revealing important qualitative details that have been missed in the literature. We also provide easy to use analytic formulae that can be used to calculate particle production in generic FOPT setups.