Bubble nucleation and growth in very strong cosmological phase transitions

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Bubble nucleation and growth in very strong cosmological phase transitions
المؤلفون: Megevand, Ariel, Ramirez, Santiago
سنة النشر: 2016
المجموعة: Astrophysics
مصطلحات موضوعية: Astrophysics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
الوصف: Strongly first-order phase transitions, i.e., those with a large order parameter, are characterized by a considerable supercooling and high velocities of phase transition fronts. A very strong phase transition may have important cosmological consequences due to the departures from equilibrium caused in the plasma. In general, there is a limit to the strength, since the metastability of the old phase may prevent the transition to complete. Near this limit, the bubble nucleation rate achieves a maximum and thus departs from the widely assumed behavior in which it grows exponentially with time. We study the dynamics of this kind of phase transitions. We show that in some cases a gaussian approximation for the nucleation rate is more suitable, and in such a case we solve analytically the evolution of the phase transition. We compare the gaussian and exponential approximations with realistic cases and we determine their ranges of validity. We also discuss the implications for cosmic remnants such as gravitational waves.
Comment: 40 pages, 11 figures. v2: several comments and references added
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2017.03.009
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05853
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.1611.05853
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv
الوصف
DOI:10.1016/j.nuclphysb.2017.03.009