Gravitational waves from Abelian gauge fields and cosmic strings at preheating

Journal Article · Fri Oct 15 00:00:00 EDT 2010 · Physical Review. D, Particles Fields

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PHYSREVD.82.083518· OSTI ID:21432364

Dufaux, Jean-Francois ^[1]; Figueroa, Daniel G ^[2]; Garcia-Bellido, Juan ^[2]

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1. APC, UMR 7164 (CNRS-Universite Paris 7), 10 rue Alice Domon et Leonie Duquet, 75205 Paris Cedex 13 (France)
2. Instituto de Fisica Teorica UAM/CSIC, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid (Spain)

Primordial gravitational waves provide a very important stochastic background that could be detected soon with interferometric gravitational wave antennas or indirectly via the induced patterns in the polarization anisotropies of the cosmic microwave background. The detection of these waves will open a new window into the early Universe, and therefore it is important to characterize in detail all possible sources of primordial gravitational waves. In this paper we develop theoretical and numerical methods to study the production of gravitational waves from out-of-equilibrium gauge fields at preheating. We then consider models of preheating after hybrid inflation, where the symmetry breaking field is charged under a local U(1) symmetry. We analyze in detail the dynamics of the system in both momentum and configuration space. We show that gauge fields leave specific imprints in the resulting gravitational wave spectra, mainly through the appearance of new peaks at characteristic frequencies that are related to the mass scales in the problem. We also show how these new features in the spectra correlate with stringlike spatial configurations in both the Higgs and gauge fields that arise due to the appearance of topological winding numbers of the Higgs around Nielsen-Olesen strings. We study in detail the time evolution of the spectrum of gauge fields and gravitational waves as these strings evolve and decay before entering a turbulent regime where the gravitational wave energy density saturates.

• OSTI ID: 21432364
• Journal Information: Physical Review. D, Particles Fields, Vol. 82, Issue 8; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevD.82.083518; (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics; ISSN 0556-2821
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ANISOTROPY
DETECTION
ENERGY DENSITY
EQUILIBRIUM
GAUGE INVARIANCE
GRAVITATIONAL WAVES
HEAT TREATMENTS
HIGGS BOSONS
HIGGS MODEL
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RELICT RADIATION
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STOCHASTIC PROCESSES
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U-1 GROUPS
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BOSONS
ELECTROMAGNETIC RADIATION
ELEMENTARY PARTICLES
INVARIANCE PRINCIPLES
LIE GROUPS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
MATHEMATICS
MICROWAVE RADIATION
PARTICLE MODELS
POSTULATED PARTICLES
RADIATIONS
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U GROUPS