Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A bstract Gravitational waves (GWs) are a powerful probe of the earliest moments in the Universe, enabling us to test fundamental interactions at energy scales beyond the reach of laboratory experiments. In this work, we assess the GW capability to probe the origin of the flavour sector of the Standard Model (SM). Within the context of Froggatt-Nielsen models of fermion masses and mixing based on a gauged U(1) flavour symmetry, we investigate the formation of cosmic strings and the resulting GW background (GWB), estimating the sensitivity to the model’s parameter space of future GW experiments. Comparing these results with the bounds from low-energy flavour observables, we find that these two types of experimental probes of the model are nicely complementary. Flavour physics observables can probe low to intermediate symmetry-breaking scales v ϕ , while future GW experiments are sensitive to the opposite regime, for which the string tension is large enough to yield sizeable GW signals, and in the long run can set an upper limit on the scale as stringent as v ϕ ≲ 10 9 GeV. In certain scenarios, the combination of flavour constraints and future GW bounds can bring about a complete closure of the available parameter space, which illustrates how GWB searches can play an important role in testing the origin of the SM flavour sector even if that occurs at ultra-high energies.
Source: Journal of High Energy Physics
Language: English
Subfield: Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Awards: Incoming scientific stay in Flanders 28/09/2023-8/10/2023 - prof. Dr. Lorenzo Calibbi, G432818845, Beyond the Standard Model with phase transitions and gravitational waves, G6689774731, EXC 2121: Quantum Universe, The stochastic gravitational wave background: from models to observation, G7919756930
OpenAlex ID: W4410079005