Gravitational Waves from Confining Dark Sectors with Self-Consistent Effective Potentials

TL;DR

This paper predicts gravitational wave signals from phase transitions in confining dark sectors, using self-consistent effective potentials and theoretical constraints, and finds these signals are harder to detect than previously thought.

Contribution

It introduces a self-consistent method for predicting gravitational waves from dark sector phase transitions with detailed effective potential analysis.

Findings

Theoretical constraints limit detectable gravitational wave signals.

Including Polyakov-loop effects refines the effective potential.

Viable parameter space for detection is significantly reduced.

Abstract

In this work, we present a self-consistent prediction for the gravitational wave signal arising from confinement-induced phase transitions in hidden non-Abelian SU(N) gauge theories with F light flavors. To do this, we impose perturbativity and unitarity constraints on the thermal effective potential to identify the portion of parameter space that admits a reliable effective field theory description. We also include the Polyakov-loop-improved finite-temperature potential for both N=3 and N=4, where N is the number of dark colors, using an approximate computation of the mediating effects. We compute the resulting gravitational wave spectrum and delineate the regions of parameter space that remain phenomenologically viable after imposing theoretical consistency conditions. We find that these constraints make uncovering a stochastic background gravitational wave signal in this scenario more challenging, even for proposed future detectors.