Probing Trans-electroweak First Order Phase Transitions from Gravitational Waves

Understand

We propose direct tests of very high energy first-order phase transitions, which are elusive to collider physics, deploying the gravitational waves measurements.

• We show that first-order phase transitions lying into a large window of critical temperatures, which is considerably larger than the electroweak energy scale, can be tested from aLIGO and Einstein Telescope.
• This provides the possibility to probe several inflationary mechanisms ending with the inflaton in a false minimum, and high-energy first order phase transitions that are due to new scalar bosons, beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.
• As an important example, we consider the axion monodromy inflationary scenario, and analyze the potential for its experimental verification, deploying the gravitational wave interferometers.