Exakta förutsägelser av gravitationsvågor från den elektrosvaga fasövergången – Test av elektrosvag baryogenesis

The Swedish Research Council decided on June 7, 2021 to grant one project for international postdoc within natural and engineering sciences. The Department of Physics and Astronomy was granted SEK 3 450 000 for the period 2021-2024 for one project.

Read more about International postdoc within natural and engineering sciences 2021

Project title: Accurate Predictions of Gravitational Waves From the Electroweak Phase Transition—Testing Electroweak Baryogenesis
Main applicant: Andreas Ekstedt, High Energy Physics
Grant amount: 3 450 000 SEK for the period 2021-2024

The discovery of gravitational waves opened up a new avenue for studying the Electroweak phase transition. If this transition is first-order then, as with boiling water, bubbles form in the primordial universe. As these bubbles expand, they can create gravitational waves. And these bubbles can also explain why there is so little antimatter in the universe – an excess of matter can form in front of the bubbles. This is called Electroweak Baryogenesis.

This project will develop the necessary tools for studying the Electroweak phase transition and the associated gravitational waves. These techniques focus on describing the bubbles, which proceed via quantum tunneling, at finite temperature. Related is the study of Baryon-violating processes, Sphalerons, crucial for explaining the near absence of antimatter. These quantities will be studied with perturbative and functional techniques. The results will be compared to numerical benchmark calculations.

Other quantities at the phase transition include the critical temperature and the latent heat. These quantities will be studied with the effective potential which is analogous to the free energy and incorporates quantum and thermal effects.

The project will be organized around developing new methods and directly applying them to specific models. Upon returning to the administrating organisation, public software incorporating the developed methods will be created. All the methods will then be tested on a wide class of models.