Gravitational Wave with Domain Wall Dominance

arXiv:2504.02462 · astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph, hep-th · Submitted 2025-04-03 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph, hep-th

Submitted: 2025-04-03

Updated: 2026-08-31

Comments: 15 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. v2: minor corrections, references added, v3: matches the published version

Journal ref: JCAP 08 (2026) 060

DOI: 10.1088/1475-7516/2026/08/060

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Domain walls (DWs) can be produced when a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken, and long-lived DWs can dominate the energy density of the universe.

Terminology

Domain Walls — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Benchmark — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Topological Defects — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
National Research Foundation of Korea — 3× in this paper
Symmetry Breaking — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
Domain Walls (DWs) — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Einstein Telescope — 2× in this paper
Phase Transitions — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Velocity-dependent One-Scale — 2× in this paper
Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Aharonov-Bohm Effect — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
Boltzmann Equation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Elias — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
Quantization — 1× in this paper · explained in 12 episodes
Spectral Distortions — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Abstract

Domain walls (DWs) can be produced when a discrete symmetry is spontaneously broken, and long-lived DWs can dominate the energy density of the universe. In this work, we explore the possibility that a "domain wall dominant (DWD)" phase existed in the early universe and ended with DW decay. During the DWD phase, the universe undergoes a power-law accelerated expansion of the scale factor and exhibits temporal superhorizon evolution of the relevant frequency modes. We show that this can lead to distinct features imprinted on the stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background including the independence of its amplitude from the wall tension. Our findings provide a comprehensive framework for evaluating GW emission associated with DWD, leading to distinguishable long-lived DW-induced GWs from other cosmological sources, with significant implications for future GW observatories.

Terminology

Abstract

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