Gravitational waves from domain walls in the Standard Model

Abstract

We study domain walls interpolating between the physical electroweak vacuum and the global minimum of the Standard Model scalar potential appearing at very high field strengths. Such domain walls could be created in the early Universe under the assumption of validity of the Standard Model up to very high energy scales. The creation of the network of domain walls which ends up in the electroweak vacuum percolating through the Universe is not as difficult to obtain as one may expect, although it requires certain tuning of initial conditions. Our numerical simulations confirm that such domain walls would swiftly decay. Moreover we have found that for the standard cosmology the energy density of gravitational waves emitted from domain walls is too small to be observed in present and planned detectors.