Probing the Electroweak Sphaleron with Gravitational Waves

Understand

We present the relation between the sphaleron energy and the gravitational wave signals from a first order electroweak phase transition.

• The crucial ingredient is the scaling law between the sphaleron energy at the temperature of the phase transition and that at zero temperature.
• We estimate the baryon number preservation criterion, and observe that for a sufficiently strong phase transition, it is possible to probe the electroweak sphaleron using measurements of future space-based gravitational wave detectors.