Non-Scaling Topological Defects and Gravitational Waves in Higgs Portal

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that in Higgs portal models, topological defects like domain walls and cosmic strings can form in the early Universe due to non-adiabatic Higgs oscillations, leading to significant gravitational waves and potential cosmological phenomena.

Contribution

It introduces lattice simulations showing defect formation without symmetry restoration and explores their gravitational wave signatures and cosmological implications.

Findings

Topological defects form even without symmetry restoration due to early Universe dynamics.

Gravitational waves from these defects can be significant and detectable.

Defects may induce miniclusters and primordial black holes.

Abstract

One of the simplest extensions of the Standard Model is the Higgs portal extension involving a dark Higgs. Dark sectors that include dark matter candidates, WIMPs, axions, and dark photons, can naturally have this type of interaction, where the dark Higgs is charged under some symmetry, which may or may not be spontaneous broken by the vacuum expectation value. In this paper, using lattice simulations, I show that if the reheating temperature of the Universe is sufficiently high, topological defects such as domain walls and cosmic strings associated with these symmetries are naturally formed even if the symmetries are never restored due to negative thermal mass squareds. This occurs due to the early Universe's non-adiabatic oscillation of the Higgs around the onset of oscillation, which overshoots the origin, and tachyonic instability that enhances fluctuations. The gravitational waves generated by these topological defects may be very significant due to the energetic processes induced by matter effects in the hot and dense Universe irrelevant to the typical energy scale of the dark sector in the vacuum or whether the symmetry is broken in the vacuum. Alongside earlier studies such as usual phase transition, melting domain walls and melting cosmic strings scenarios that assume a symmetric phase in the early Universe, the Higgs portal models naturally predict local overdensities from topological defects, which may induce miniclusters and primordial black holes, as well as the gravitational waves.These phenomena provide novel opportunities to search for such scenarios. I also perform various numerical simulations for the relevant topic including melting domain walls and cosmic strings with inflationary and Gaussian fluctuations, for comparison--which have not been performed previously.