Bubble wall velocity from holography

Abstract

Cosmological phase transitions proceed via the nucleation of bubbles that subsequently expand and collide. The resulting gravitational wave spectrum depends crucially on the bubble wall velocity. We use holography to compute the wall velocity from first principles in a strongly coupled, non-Abelian, four-dimensional gauge theory. The wall velocity is determined dynamically in terms of the nucleation temperature. We verify that ideal hydrodynamics provides a good description of the system everywhere except near the wall.