Speaker
Description
In many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics, there would have been first order phase transitions in the early Universe, producing a stochastic background of gravitational waves. This talk reports on large-scale numerical simulations of gravitational wave production at strong phase transitions, seeking to understand the characteristic spectra of the evolving compressional and vortical modes of the fluid.
One transition proceeding by detonation and another by deflagration have been studied.
A flow with similar magnitudes of vortical and compressional modes, as produced by the deflagration, has a very similar form to the mostly compressional flow produced by the detonation. For the first time, saturation of the gravitational wave power spectra due to non-linear decay of the flow is seen.
