Domain walls and gravitational waves in the Standard Model

Understand

We study domain walls which can be created in the Standard Model under the assumption that it is valid up to very high energy scales.

• We focus on domain walls interpolating between the physical electroweak vacuum and the global minimum appearing at very high field strengths.
• The creation of the network which ends up in the electroweak vacuum percolating through the Universe is not as difficult to obtain as one may expect, although it requires certain tuning of initial conditions.
• Our numerical simulations confirm that such domain walls would swiftly decay and thus cannot dominate the Universe.