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Gravity tidings from domain walls: Flavour hierarchies are making waves

Stefan Antusch, Ivo de Medeiros Varzielas, Miguel Levy

Abstract

Explaining the observed charged fermion mass hierarchies points to flavour symmetries inducing a suppression of the lighter species' masses. When the symmetries are global, it is expected that such symmetries are broken by gravity via Planck scale suppressed effective operators. The potential of the spontaneous symmetry-breaking "flavon" field, if the symmetry is discrete, then possesses several minima, with the vacuum-degeneracy lifted by the gravity effects. In such scenarios, domain walls might be generated in the process of symmetry breaking. Due to the bias, however, they potentially annihilate sufficiently before Big Bang nucleosynthesis, avoiding conflict with observations and generating a characteristic contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. We discuss whether and how minimalistic supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric realisations of such theories can give rise to observable gravitational waves.

Gravity tidings from domain walls: Flavour hierarchies are making waves

Abstract

Explaining the observed charged fermion mass hierarchies points to flavour symmetries inducing a suppression of the lighter species' masses. When the symmetries are global, it is expected that such symmetries are broken by gravity via Planck scale suppressed effective operators. The potential of the spontaneous symmetry-breaking "flavon" field, if the symmetry is discrete, then possesses several minima, with the vacuum-degeneracy lifted by the gravity effects. In such scenarios, domain walls might be generated in the process of symmetry breaking. Due to the bias, however, they potentially annihilate sufficiently before Big Bang nucleosynthesis, avoiding conflict with observations and generating a characteristic contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. We discuss whether and how minimalistic supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric realisations of such theories can give rise to observable gravitational waves.
Paper Structure (8 sections, 27 equations, 1 figure, 1 table)

This paper contains 8 sections, 27 equations, 1 figure, 1 table.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. A Minimal Discrete Froggatt-Nielsen
  3. Domain Walls from $Z_N$ Symmetries
  4. Gravitational Wave Signal: General Considerations
  5. The non-SUSY case
  6. The SUSY case
  7. Results
  8. Conclusions

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: In teal, the GW spectrum for a benchmark case with $m_\text{SUSY} = 10$ TeV and $v_0 \approx 5 \times 10^{11}$ GeV. In gray (dashed for $m_\text{SUSY} < 1$ TeV), peak amplitude and frequency for $v_0$ and $m_\text{SUSY}$ isocurves. The arrows (gray) and band (green) show the 90% shift of the peak positions due to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ coefficients. Experimental sensitivities are taken from Schmitz:2020syl and for details on the nucleosynthesis (BBN) bound see e.g. Maggiore:1999vm.