Speaker
Description
Cosmological phase transitions remain an enticing prospect for future gravitational wave observations but second order phase transitions have been relatively untouched in the literature. To remedy this, we study the gravitational waves produced from a potential second order cosmological phase transition. We compute the anisotropic stress correlation function within multiple models of critical dynamics (listed in the Hohenberg-Halperin catalogue) using dynamic perturbation theory, and access the critical theories using Wilson's epsilon expansion. We find that the models studied produce distinct sub-Hubble spectra which rather generically dominate over the spectrum produced by hydrodynamic fluctuations in the Standard Model, and in particular, Model H, the model describing the dynamic universality class of the QCD phase transition, produces a strong signal which may be detected by future high-frequency gravitational wave detectors.