Dynamics of bubble walls at the electroweak phase transition

¹ INFN Sezione di Firenze and Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Firenze, Via G. Sansone 1, I-50019 Sesto Fiorentino, Italy
² Dipartimento di Fisica, Universit‘a della Calabria, I-87036 Arcavacata di Rende, Cosenza, Italy
³ IFAE and BIST, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

^* e-mail: stefania.decurtis@fi.infn.it
^** e-mail: luigi.dellerose@unical.it
^*** e-mail: andrea.guiggiani@unifi.it
^**** e-mail: agil@ifae.es
^† e-mail: giuliano.panico@unifi.it

Published online: 17 November 2022

Abstract

First order phase transitions in the early universe naturally lead to the production of a stochastic background of gravitational waves and to the generation of a matter-antimatter asymmetry. The dynamics of the phase transition is affected by the density perturbations in the hot plasma. We address this topic by providing, for the first time, a full numerical solution to the linearized Boltzmann equation for the top quark species coupled to the Higgs field during a first order phase transition at the electroweak scale. Differently from the traditional approaches, our results do not depend on any ansatz and can fully describe the non-equilibrium distribution functions of the particle species in the plasma.