Effective picture of bubble expansion [CEA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2011.11451


Recently the thermal friction on an expanding bubble from the cosmic first-order phase transition has been calculated to all orders of the interactions between the bubble wall and thermal plasma, leading to a $\gamma^2$-scaling instead of the previously estimated $\gamma^1$-scaling for the thermal friction exerted on a fast-moving bubble wall with a Lorentz factor $\gamma$. We propose for the first time the effective equation of motion (EOM) for an expanding bubble wall in the presence of an arbitrary $\gamma$-scaling friction to compute the efficiency factor from bubble collisions, which, in the case of $\gamma^2$-scaling friction, is found to be larger than the recently updated estimation when the bubble walls collide after starting to approach a constant terminal velocity, leading to a slightly larger signal of the gravitational waves background from bubble collisions due to its quadratic dependence on the bubble collision efficiency factor, although the $\gamma^2$-scaling friction itself has already suppressed the contribution from bubble collisions compared to that with $\gamma^1$-scaling friction. We also suggest a phenomenological parameterization for the out-of-equilibrium term in the Boltzmann equation that could reproduce the recently found $(\gamma^2-1)$-scaling of the friction term in the effective EOM of an expanding bubble wall, which merits further study in future numerical simulations of bubble expansion and collisions.

Read this paper on arXiv…

R. Cai and S. Wang
Tue, 24 Nov 2020
42/83

Comments: 26 pages, 2 figures