No Arabic abstract
We study a possibility of a strong first-order phase transition (FOPT) taking place below the electroweak scale in the context of $U(1)_D$ gauge extension of the standard model. As pointed out recently by the NANOGrav collaboration, gravitational waves from such a phase transition with appropriate strength and nucleation temperature can explain their 12.5 yr data. We first find the parameter space of this minimal model consistent with NANOGrav findings considering only a complex singlet scalar and $U(1)_D$ vector boson. Existence of a singlet fermion charged under $U(1)_D$ can give rise to dark matter in this model, preferably of non-thermal type, while incorporating additional fields can also generate light neutrino masses through typical low scale seesaw mechanisms like radiative or inverse seesaw.
The NANOGrav Collaboration recently reported a strong evidence for a stochastic common-spectrum process in the pulsar-timing data. We evaluate the evidence of interpreting this process as mergers of super massive black hole binaries and/or various stochastic gravitational wave background sources in the early Universe, including first-order phase transitions, cosmic strings, domain walls, and large amplitude curvature perturbations. We discuss the implications of the constraints on these possible sources. It is found that the cosmic string is the most favored source against other gravitational wave sources based on the Bayes factor analysis.
We investigate first order phase transitions in a holographic setting of five-dimensional Einstein gravity coupled to a scalar field, constructing phase diagrams of the dual field theory at finite temperature. We scan over the two-dimensional parameter space of a simple bottom-up model and map out important quantities for the phase transition: the region where first order phase transitions take place; the latent heat, the transition strength parameter $alpha$, and the stiffness. We find that $alpha$ is generically in the range 0.1 to 0.3, and is strongly correlated with the stiffness (the square of the sound speed in a barotropic fluid). Using the LISA Cosmology Working Group gravitational wave power spectrum model corrected for kinetic energy suppression at large $alpha$ and non-conformal stiffness, we outline the observational prospects at the future space-based detectors LISA and TianQin. A TeV-scale hidden sector with a phase transition described by the model could be observable at both detectors.
We propose a novel mechanism to realize leptogenesis through the Breit-Wigner resonance of a dark $U(1)_D$ gauge boson $Z_D$, which mediates lepton number violating annihilations of dark matter (DM) in the context of the scotogenic model with a $U(1)_D$. The processes occur out of equilibrium and the DM freezes out lately giving rise to the observed abundance. The CP violation required for leptogenesis can be achieved by the interference between tree-level t-channel scattering of DM and the subsequent 1-loop mediated by $Z_D$, which arises due to the unremovable imaginary part of either the $Z_D$ propagator coming from its self-energy correction or the 1-loop giving rise to the effective coupling of $Z_Dbar{ u} u$.
We search for a first-order phase transition gravitational wave signal in 45 pulsars from the NANOGrav 12.5 year dataset. We find that the data can be explained in terms of a strong first order phase transition taking place at temperatures below the electroweak scale. In our search, we find that the signal from a first order phase transition is degenerate with that generated by Supermassive Black Hole Binary mergers. An interesting open question is how well gravitational wave observatories could separate such signals.
We present time-of-arrival (TOA) measurements and timing models of 47 millisecond pulsars (MSPs) observed from 2004 to 2017 at the Arecibo Observatory and the Green Bank Telescope by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav). The observing cadence was three to four weeks for most pulsars over most of this time span, with weekly observations of six sources. These data were collected for use in low-frequency gravitational wave searches and for other astrophysical purposes. We detail our observational methods and present a set of TOA measurements, based on narrowband analysis, in which many TOAs are calculated within narrow radio-frequency bands for data collected simultaneously across a wide bandwidth. A separate set of wideband TOAs will be presented in a companion paper. We detail a number of methodological changes compared to our previous work which yield a cleaner and more uniformly processed data set. Our timing models include several new astrometric and binary pulsar measurements, including previously unpublished values for the parallaxes of PSRs J1832-0836 and J2322+2057, the secular derivatives of the projected semi-major orbital axes of PSRs J0613-0200 and J2229+2643, and the first detection of the Shapiro delay in PSR J2145-0750. We report detectable levels of red noise in the time series for 14 pulsars. As a check on timing model reliability, we investigate the stability of astrometric parameters across data sets of different lengths. We report flux density measurements for all pulsars observed. Searches for stochastic and continuous gravitational waves using these data will be subjects of forthcoming publications.