Gravitational Waves from Confining Dark Sectors with Self-Consistent Effective Potentials

Abstract

In this work, we present a self-consistent prediction for the gravitational wave signal arising from confinement-induced phase transitions in hidden non-Abelian SU(N) gauge theories with F light flavors. To do this, we impose perturbativity and unitarity constraints on the thermal effective potential to identify the portion of parameter space that admits a reliable effective field theory description. We also include the Polyakov-loop-improved finite-temperature potential for both N=3 and N=4, where N is the number of dark colors, using an approximate computation of the mediating effects. We compute the resulting gravitational wave spectrum and delineate the regions of parameter space that remain phenomenologically viable after imposing theoretical consistency conditions. We find that these constraints make uncovering a stochastic background gravitational wave signal in this scenario more challenging, even for proposed future detectors.