Gravitational wave signature of generic disappearance of $Z_2$-symmetry breaking domain walls

Abstract

Breaking of discrete parity at high scale gives rise to $Z_2$-domain walls (DW). The metastability of such walls can make them relatively long lived and contradict standard cosmology. We consider two classes of theories with similar underlying feature, the left right symmetric theories and two Higgs doublet models. Both of them possess some breaking of $Z_2$ discrete symmetries. As a first step, domains form at a high energy scale during parity breaking. In the second step, these domains further decompose into subdomains due to $Z_2$ symmetry breaking in two Higgs doublet models closer to the electroweak scale. We show that after this two step formation of domains and subdomains, a QCD instanton induced energy difference can remove the domain walls as well as the subdomain walls at around the same time successfully. The removal occurs purely as the result of a chance event taking place with probability very close to 0.25, and does not require one to introduce any non-renormalisable $Z_2$-symmetry breaking term to the Lagrangian. We then investigate the gravitational waves arising from the collapse of such domain walls and show that the peak frequency of these waves lies in the $10^{-7}$--$10^{-6}~\mbox{Hz}$ band, corresponding to annihilation temperatures of $1$--$10$ GeV. This frequency band is sensitive to pulsar timing array based experiments such as SKA and NANOGrav. The recent NANOGrav results rule out our DW collapse model for higher values of parity breaking scale above $10^7$ GeV. Our DW collapse model with parity breaking scales below $10^7$ GeV remains consistent with the current NANOGrav results and has a good chance of being seriously tested in future pulsar timing based experiments.