Dark Confinement and Chiral Phase Transitions: Gravitational Waves vs Matter Representations

Understand

We study the gravitational-wave signal stemming from strongly coupled models featuring both, dark chiral and confinement phase transitions.

• We therefore identify strongly coupled theories that can feature a first-order phase transition.
• Employing the Polyakov-Nambu-Jona-Lasinio model, we focus our attention on SU(3) Yang-Mills theories featuring fermions in fundamental, adjoint, and two-index symmetric representations.
• We discover that for the gravitational-wave signals analysis, there are significant differences between the various representations.