Speaker
Description
Studying the evolution of bubbles is a necessary part of learning about the progression of early universe phase transitions and resulting gravitational waves. In this work we look into the effects the background thermal fluctuations have on the field evolution during the phase transition in O(N) scalar field theory. We do a classical statistical simulation of two colliding bubbles nucleated on top of the background fluctuations. As a two-bubble collision has O(2,1) symmetry, this system can be examined in cylindrical coordinates, reducing the number of simulated spatial dimensions. This, however, means that the fluctuations must also be resolved in cylindrical coordinates, for which we developed a mode expansion. The focus of the research is the qualitative effect of fluctuations on O(N) bubble collisions. Mainly, our results will give insight into how fluctuations and the symmetry group affect the efficiency of gravitational wave production.
