Nonscaling Topological Defects and Gravitational Waves in Higgs Portal

Abstract One of the simplest extensions of the Standard Model is the Higgs portal extension involving a dark Higgs. Dark sectors that include dark matter candidates, weakly interacting massive particles, axions, and dark photons, can naturally have this type of interaction, where the dark Higgs is charged under some symmetry, which may or may not be spontaneously broken by the vacuum expectation value. In this paper, using lattice simulations, I show that if the reheating temperature of the Universe is sufficiently high, topological defects such as domain walls and cosmic strings associated with these symmetries are naturally formed even if the symmetries are never restored due to negative thermal mass squares. This occurs due to the early Universe’s nonadiabatic oscillation of the Higgs around the onset of oscillation, which overshoots the origin, and tachyonic instability that enhances fluctuations. The gravitational waves generated by these topological defects can be very significant due to the energetic processes induced by matter effects in the hot and dense Universe irrelevant to the typical energy scale of the dark sector in the vacuum or whether the symmetry is broken in the vacuum. Alongside earlier studies that assume a symmetric phase in the early Universe, the Higgs portal models naturally predict local overdensities from topological defects, which can induce miniclusters and primordial black holes, as well as the gravitational waves. These phenomena provide novel opportunities to search for models with the Higgs portal extension.