Fixing IR tail of gravitational waves from domain walls
Ivan Dankovsky, Dmitry Gorbunov
gr-qc, astro-ph.CO, hep-ph
Submitted: 2026-07-27
Comments: 8 pages, 12 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Numerical simulations of gravitational waves (GW) production during violent evolution of matter inhomogeneities in the early Universe yield highly wiggle infrared parts of the spectra.
Terminology
Abstract
Numerical simulations of gravitational waves (GW) production during violent evolution of matter inhomogeneities in the early Universe yield highly wiggle infrared parts of the spectra. Obtained directly from the two-point correlation function, these wiggles are nonphysical, corresponding to the parasitic, double frequency terms in naively averaged squared oscillation amplitudes of GW, and hence must be washed out. The deep infrared behavior can be predicted on general grounds, e.g. fixed by causality considerations. However, what matters for real observations, e.g. like that of NANOGrav, and what can be only inferred from numerical simulations, is the infrared slope near the maximum of the spectrum. It reflects the dynamics responsible for the GW production in its heyday, and hence must be accurately predicted. We illustrate the problem with numerical simulations of the Domain Wall network performed with the help of code CosmoLattice. We suggest a numerical procedure to smooth out these parasitic wiggles, which allows us to recover the true spectrum. Being quite generic, it may be applied to numerical simulations of other hypothetical sources of GW possibly operating in the early Universe. The procedure requires to extend the simulation by a few Hubble times after termination of the GW production. We checked with numerical simulations, that the technically natural long-time extension of simulations, which becomes available via artificial scaling of different parts in the scalar sector equations provided by PRS prescription, gives wrong GW spectra even if the source terms are properly rescaled.
Sources
- Open data from the third observing run of LIGO, Virgo, KAGRA and GEO
- GWTC-4.0: Updating the Gravitational-Wave Transient Catalog with Observations from the First Part of the Fourth LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Observing Run
- Search for an isotropic gravitational-wave background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
- Searching for the nano-Hertz stochastic gravitational wave background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I
- The second data release from the European Pulsar Timing Array III. Search for gravitational wave signals
- The NANOGrav 15-year Data Set: Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
- Comparing recent PTA results on the nanohertz stochastic gravitational wave background
- CosmoLattice
- The NANOGrav 15 yr Data Set: Running of the Spectral Index
- Present and future of CosmoLattice
- Cosmic domain walls on a lattice: illusive effects of initial conditions
- On the estimation of gravitational wave spectrum from cosmic domain walls
- Cosmological Backgrounds of Gravitational Waves
- Revisiting evolution of domain walls and their gravitational radiation with CosmoLattice
- Gravitational Waves from Domain Wall Collapse, and Application to Nanohertz Signals with QCD-coupled Axions
- Near-Peak Spectrum of Gravitational Waves from Collapsing Domain Walls
- The Spectrum of Gravitational Waves from Annihilating Domain Walls
- Biased domain walls: faster annihilation, weaker gravitational waves
- Biased Domain Wall Networks and their Gravitational Waves
- Beyond freeze-in: Dark Matter via inverse phase transition and gravitational wave signal
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