Gravitational Waves produced by Compressible MHD Turbulence from Cosmological Phase Transitions

Abstract

We calculate the gravitational wave spectrum produced by magneto-hydrodynamic turbulence in a first order phase transitions. We focus in particular on the role of decorrelation of incompressible (solenoidal) homogeneous isotropic turbulence, which is dominated by the sweeping effect. The sweeping effect describes that turbulent decorrelation is primarily due to the small scale eddies being swept with by large scale eddies in a stochastic manner. This effect reduces the gravitational wave signal produced by incompressible MHD turbulence by around an order of magnitude compared to previous studies. Additionally, we find a more complicated dependence for the spectral shape of the gravitational wave spectrum on the energy density sourced by solenoidal modes (magnetic and kinetic). The high frequency tail follows either a $k^{-5/3}$ or a $k^{-8/3}$ power law for large and small solenoidal turbulence density parameter, respectively. Further, magnetic helicity tends to increase the gravitational wave energy at low frequencies. Moreover, we show how solenoidal modes might impact the gravitational wave spectrum from dilatational modes e.g. sound waves. We find that solenoidal modes greatly affect the shape of the gravitational wave spectrum due to the sweeping effect on the dilatational modes. For a high velocity flow, one expects a $k^{-2}$ high frequency tail, due to sweeping. In contrast, for a low velocity flow and a sound wave dominated flow, we expect a $k^{-3}$ high frequency tail. If neither of these limiting cases is realized, the gravitational wave spectrum may be a broken power law with index between -2 and -3, extending up to the frequency at which the source is damped by viscous dissipation.