Gravitational Waves from Dark Yang-Mills Sectors

Understand

Dark Yang-Mills sectors, which are ubiquitous in the string landscape, may be reheated above their critical temperature and subsequently go through a confining first-order phase transition that produces stochastic gravitational waves in the early universe.

• Taking into account constraints from lattice and from Yang-Mills (center and Weyl) symmetries, we use a phenomenological model to construct an effective potential of the semi quark-gluon plasma phase, from which we compute the gravitational wave signal produced during confinement for numerous gauge groups.
• The signal is maximized when the dark sector dominates the energy density of the universe at the time of the phase transition.
• In that case, we find that it is within reach of the next-to-next generation of experiments (BBO, DECIGO) for a range of dark confinement scales near the weak scale.