Gravitational waves and primordial black holes produced by dark meta stable vacuum decay

Speaker

Tingyu Li (Tsinghua University)

Description

Inspired by string theory and cosmological constant problem, it is plausible that the Universe’s vacuum structure is characterized by a landscape of metastable vacua. If the dark vacuum is metastable, bubbles of lower-energy phases can nucleate at an approximately constant rate. Because the Hubble expansion rate is monotonically non-increasing with cosmic time, such nucleation can eventually lead to percolation and completion of a dark-sector phase transition. In this work, we investigate the phenomenological consequences of this transition, focusing on the resulting stochastic gravitational-wave background and the potential formation of primordial black holes.

Authors

Prof. Haipeng An (Tsinghua University) Tingyu Li (Tsinghua University) Dr Yang Chen (Tsinghua University)

Presentation materials