Primordial scalar gravitational waves produced at the QCD phase transition due to the trace anomaly

Abstract

Relying only on the standard model of elementary particles and gravity, we study the details of a new source of gravitational waves whose origin is in quantum physics. Namely, it is well known that massless fields in curved backgrounds suffer from the so-called ‘trace anomaly’. This anomaly can be cast in terms of new scalar degrees of freedom which take account of macroscopic effects of quantum matter in gravitational fields. The linearized effective action for these fields describes scalar (as opposed to transverse) gravitational waves, which are absent in Einstein’s theory. Since these new degrees of freedom couple directly to the gauge field scalars in QCD, the epoch of the QCD phase transition in early universe is a possible source of primordial cosmological gravitational radiation. While the anomaly is most likely fully unsuppressed at the QCD densities (temperature is much higher than the u and d quark masses), just to be careful we introduced the window function which cuts-off very low frequencies where the anomaly effect might be suppressed. We then calculated the characteristic strain of the properly adjusted gravitational waves signal today. The region of the parameter space with no window function gives a stronger signal, and both the strain and the frequencies fall within the sensitivity of the near future gravitational wave experiments (e.g. LISA and The Big Bang Observer). The possibility that one can study quantum physics with gravitational wave astronomy even in principle is exciting, and will be of value for future endeavors in this field.