Cosmological phase transitions: from perturbative particle physics to gravitational waves

Understand

Gravitational waves (GWs) were recently detected for the first time.

• This revolutionary discovery opens a new way of learning about particle physics through GWs from first-order phase transitions (FOPTs) in the early Universe.
• FOPTs could occur when new fundamental symmetries are spontaneously broken down to the Standard Model and are a vital ingredient in solutions of the matter anti-matter asymmetry problem.
• The purpose of our work is to review the path from a particle physics model to GWs, which contains many specialized parts, so here we provide a timely review of all the required steps, including: (i) building a finite-temperature effective potential in a particle physics model and checking for FOPTs; (ii) computing transition rates; (iii) analyzing the dynamics of bubbles of true vacuum expanding in a thermal plasma; (iv) characterizing a transition using thermal parameters; and, finally, (v) making predictions for GW spectra using the latest simulations and theoretical results and considering the detectability of predicted spectra at future GW detectors.