Phenomenology 2026 Symposium

Session

Gravitational Waves

11 May 2026, 16:30

University of Pittsburgh

458. Gravitational Waves from an A4 Neutrino Mass Model

Cameron Moffett-Smith

11/05/2026, 16:30

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

The $A_4$ flavor symmetry has provided tremendous insight into the flavor structure of the lepton sector of the Standard Model, predicting a very good approximation to neutrino mixing angles called tri-bimaximal mixing (TBM). $A_4$ is spontaneously broken by a scalar called the flavon, and when this happens a number of degenerate vacua can form, resulting in so-called domain walls. These...

333. Uncool phase transitions from soft walls

Ameen Ismail

11/05/2026, 16:45

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

Theories with warped extra dimensions, like the Randall-Sundrum (RS) model, exhibit a holographic phase transition from a hot, deconfined black brane phase to a cool, confined phase. The standard picture of a first-order, strongly supercooled phase transition is expected to change in variations where the extra dimension is smoothly cut off by a soft-wall curvature singularity, as opposed to a...

276. New Sensitivity to High Frequency Gravitational Waves from Radio Telescopes

Ethan Baker (Boston University)

11/05/2026, 17:00

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

Recently, there has been a wealth of new experimental proposals to potentially discover gravitational waves with frequencies in the MHz to GHz regime, which would be smoking-gun evidence of physics beyond the Standard Model. In this work, we show that existing radio telescope facilities like CHIME and FAST have comparable or better sensitivity to high-frequency gravitational waves than many...

454. Gravitational Waves from Early-Universe Turbulent sources

Murman Gurgenidze (Carnegie Mellon University)

11/05/2026, 17:15

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

The early universe provides a natural testing ground for theories beyond the Standard Model. One well-motivated extension is the introduction of first-order phase transitions, which generically produce a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background. In this work, we study GWs sourced by decaying turbulence and highlight the role of the relevant time scales, most notably the decay parameter ...

407. Does NANOGrav favor massive gravity?

Chris Choi (Carnegie Mellon University)

11/05/2026, 17:30

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

Pulsar timing arrays probe the stochastic gravitational wave background through the angular cross-correlations of pulsar timing residuals. For an isotropic tensor background in general relativity, the expected overlap reduction function is the Hellings-Downs curve. We investigate how ghost-free massive gravity modifies this prediction through a massive dispersion relation and additional vector...

340. Gravitational Waves from Long Strings and Loops

Christos Litos (University of Florida)

11/05/2026, 17:45

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

We compute the gravitational wave (GW) spectrum from scaling global cosmic string networks across infrared and ultraviolet scales. In the infrared (k ≲ ℓ^{-1}), we derive the spectrum analytically using the unequal time correlator (UETC) of the string stress-energy tensor within the unconnected segment and loop model (USLM), a new extension of the unconnected segment model that incorporates...

447. Testing Massive Gravity Using European Pulsar Timing Array Data

Marcus Bosca (Carnegie Mellon University)

11/05/2026, 18:00

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

Pulsar timing array datasets are used to detect a stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) through angular cross-correlations between timing residuals measured from different pulsars. Analytically, these cross-correlations are computed through the overlap reduction function (ORF), which expresses the GW signal strength’s dependence on the angular separation of the pulsars. Since a GW’s...

255. Baryophilic gauge and Gravitational Wave Effect

Mr Abdul Rahaman Shaikh (Centre for Theoretical Physics, Jamia Millia Islamia)

11/05/2026, 18:15

Gravitational Waves and Particle Physics

We investigate a minimal extension of the standard model that includes an additional baryophilic abelian gauge symmetry. In these classically conformal models, the thermal phase transition, driven by the Coleman-Weinberg mechanism, is strongly first-order with significant supercooling, producing observable stochastic gravitational wave signals. Our analysis reveals a substantial parameter...