Gravitational imprints from heavy Kaluza-Klein resonances
Eugenio Megías, Germano Nardini, M. Quirós
Abstract
We systematically study the holographic phase transition of the radion field in a five-dimensional warped model which includes a scalar potential with a powerlike behavior. We consider Kaluza-Klein (KK) resonances with masses ${m}_{\mathrm{KK}}$ at the TeV scale or beyond. The backreaction of the radion field on the gravitational metric is taken into account by using the superpotential formalism. The confinement/deconfinement first order phase transition leads to a gravitational wave stochastic background which mainly depends on the scale ${m}_{\mathrm{KK}}$ and the number of colors, $N$, in the dual theory. Its power spectrum peaks at a frequency that depends on the amount of tuning required in the electroweak sector. It turns out that the present and forthcoming gravitational wave observatories can probe scenarios where the KK resonances are very heavy. Current aLIGO data already rule out vector boson KK resonances with masses in the interval ${m}_{\mathrm{KK}}\ensuremath{\sim}(1--10)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{5}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$. Future gravitational experiments will be sensitive to resonances with masses ${m}_{\mathrm{KK}}\ensuremath{\lesssim}{10}^{5}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$ (LISA), ${10}^{8}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$ (aLIGO Design) and ${10}^{9}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{TeV}$ (ET). Finally, we also find that the big bang nucleosynthesis bound in the frequency spectrum turns into a lower bound for the nucleation temperature as ${T}_{n}\ensuremath{\gtrsim}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}4}\sqrt{N}{m}_{\mathrm{KK}}$.