Energy budget of cosmological first-order phase transitions

by Thomas Markus Konstandin

Friday 5 Mar 2010, 11:30 → 12:30 Europe/Zurich

Auditoire 234

During a cosmological first-order phase transition, most of the latent heat is released into thermal energy and bulk motion of the plasma. At the end of the phase transition, when the bubbles percolate, the latter will give rise to anisotropic stress in the plasma and generate gravitational waves. In this talk I review the basic principles of gravitational wave production and the analysis of the energy budget of the phase transition by means of hydrodynamics. Finally, I will discuss how these signals can be used to constrain and/or rule out specific particle physics models.