Video: Simulation shows how bubbles create a rumbling sound
BUBBLES popping in the hot particle soup that filled the early universe may have created a rumble like thunder, and it is possible that we can detect the echoes today. Finding them could help solve some mysteries of the Higgs boson and maybe lead to new physics.
The Higgs is credited with giving most other particles mass. Physicists hope that it won鈥檛 behave as predicted, because oddball antics would give clues to new physics beyond the standard model, our best description of the known particles and forces.
One way to test Higgs theory is to listen to the sky, says at the University of Helsinki in Finland. 鈥淲hen the Higgs field was turning on everywhere and giving the other particles mass, that could have been a very violent time in the early universe,鈥� he says.
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The boson is linked to a field that permeates the universe. According to the standard model, this Higgs field switched on everywhere 100 picoseconds after the big bang. But in theories that go beyond the standard model, the transition would have happened more like water beginning to boil. Bubbles of the Higgs field would have grown in the hot dense matter that existed just after the big bang. When a bubble swept over an area, the particles in it suddenly gained the property of mass. And when the walls of Higgs bubbles met, they would have triggered ripples in the fabric of space-time called gravitational waves. Previous work has suggested that these waves would be too faint for us to detect.
Weir and his team dug deeper and ran the first three-dimensional simulation of the bubbles that includes their interaction with hot matter. They concluded that the growing bubbles would have also dumped energy into the hot particle soup, creating shock waves (Physical Review Letters, ). 鈥淭his calculation was about treating them properly, treating them like grown-up bubbles rather than toy bubbles like people had done in the past,鈥� Weir says.
鈥淭he bubbles would have dumped energy into the hot particle soup, creating shock waves鈥�
The shock waves were essentially sonic booms that would have created a low rumble. The reverberations would have made gravitational waves, even after all the bubbles had popped. If we鈥檙e lucky, Weir says, the next generation of sensitive detectors will be able to detect them.
鈥淭his result, that the sound waves play quite a big role, was completely unexpected,鈥� Weir says. 鈥淭his enhancement might be just enough to push that over the threshold and let us detect something sooner rather than later.鈥�
鈥淚 think it鈥檚 a really important step in the right direction,鈥� says Thomas Konstandin at DESY in Germany. 鈥淔urthermore, I think there are a lot of ways of improving this result.鈥� The team could simulate bubbles that expand faster than 5 per cent of the speed of light, for example. 鈥淚f you crank up the velocity, new effects might appear,鈥� he says.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淏aby universe rumbled with Higgs thunder鈥�
