Gravitational waves from non-Abelian gauge fields at a tachyonic transition

Understand

We compute the gravitational wave spectrum from a tachyonic preheating transition of a Standard Model-like SU(2)-Higgs system.

• Tachyonic preheating involves exponentially growing IR modes, at scales as large as the horizon.
• Such a transition at the electroweak scale could be detectable by LISA, if these non-perturbatively large modes translate into non-linear dynamics sourcing gravitational waves.
• Through large-scale numerical simulations, we find that the spectrum of gravitational waves does not exhibit such IR features.