Abundant production of scalars and axions from phase transition bubble expansion

Abstract

We revisit aspects of particle production during cosmological first-order phase transitions, and show that the expansion of true-vacuum bubbles can be a copious source of particle production. Specifically, for a massive spin-0 field linearly coupled to the bubble profile, spherical bubbles expanding even at \emph{constant} radial velocity efficiently produce particles until the local-rest-frame radius of curvature of the bubble wall exceeds the particle Compton wavelength -- contrary to the expectation that walls moving at constant speed cannot radiate. We compute the momentum spectrum of the produced particles for both accelerated and constant-velocity expansion histories, identify the regimes of coherent and incoherent production, quantify the validity of the perturbative treatment, and show that this mechanism can parametrically dominate other production processes of feebly coupled particles, including freeze-in. Our results apply to many models of light, feebly coupled particles studied in the literature, providing new sources of dark radiation and dark matter. In particular, a first-order deconfinement-confinement transition in a hidden Yang-Mills sector can abundantly produce axion-like particles, leading to dark radiation and/or dark matter signatures over large regions of parameter space.