Supercool subtleties of cosmological phase transitions

Abstract

We investigate rarely explored details of supercooled cosmological first-order phase transitions at the electroweak scale, which may lead to strong gravitational wave signals or explain the cosmic baryon asymmetry. The nucleation temperature is often used in phase transition analyses, and is defined through the nucleation condition: on average one bubble has nucleated per Hubble volume. We argue that the nucleation temperature is neither a fundamental nor essential quantity in phase transition analysis. We illustrate scenarios where a transition can complete without satisfying the nucleation condition, and conversely where the nucleation condition is satisfied but the transition does not complete. We also find that simple nucleation heuristics, which are defined to approximate the nucleation temperature, break down for strong supercooling. Thus, studies that rely on the nucleation temperature — approximated or otherwise — may misclassify the completion of a transition. Further, we find that the nucleation temperature decouples from the progress of the transition for strong supercooling. We advocate use of the percolation temperature as a reference temperature for gravitational wave production, because the percolation temperature is directly connected to transition progress and the collision of bubbles. Finally, we provide model-independent bounds on the bubble wall velocity that allow one to predict whether a transition completes based only on knowledge of the bounce action curve. We apply our methods to find empirical bounds on the bubble wall velocity for which the physical volume of the false vacuum decreases during the transition. We verify the accuracy of our predictions using benchmarks from a high temperature expansion of the Standard Model and from the real scalar singlet model.