Thesis

Visible gravitational echoes from invisible sectors

• Call:

  PT-CERN Call 2022/1

• Academic Year:

  2022

• Domain:

  Astroparticle Physics

• Supervisor:

  António Morais

• Co-Supervisor:

  Felipe Ferreira de Freitas

• Institution:

  Universidade de Aveiro

• Host Institution:

  CIDMA - Centro de Investigação em Matemática e Aplicações da Universidade de Aveiro

• Abstract:

  The recent Nobel prize winning detection of gravitational waves (GWs) [1] has opened up a new era of GW astronomy and, more generally, fundamental physics explorations. A potential observation of the stochastic background of primordial GWs may indicate possible New Physics (NP) beyond the SM (BSM) [2]. Indeed, such an observation may become a novel probe for New Physics possibly even inaccessible to traditional collider and astro-particle physics measurements. The principal purpose of this thesis is to explore the potential of future GW interferometers such as LISA, BBO, DECIGO and the EinsteinTelescope (ET) in probing NP scenarios that include both dark/hidden sectors as well as high-energy phase-transitions above that of the electroweak (EW) scale. As a guiding principle the work will be inspired in a class of recently proposed models [3,4] based on an Unification paradigm that includes the flavour structure observed in nature as a fundamental gauge interaction. The presence of larger symmetries in an energy range that goes from 10 TeV up to 1000 TeV and the need for a dark-sector to cancel gauge anomalies, the work will be focused in the production of multi-peaked primordial GWs covering the mHz-kHz frequency range.