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Updated: Aug 9, 2025

Orientational Transition in a Liquid Crystal Triggered by the Thermodynamic Growth of Interfacial Wetting Sheets
Published on: May 15, 2017
Constraining First-Order Phase Transitions with Curvature Perturbations
Jing Liu1,2,3, Ligong Bian4,5, Rong-Gen Cai3,6,7
1International Centre for Theoretical Physics Asia-Pacific, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 100190 Beijing, China.
Abstract:
The randomness of the quantum tunneling process induces superhorizon curvature perturbations during cosmological first-order phase transitions. We for the first time utilize curvature perturbations to constrain the phase transition parameters, and find that the observations of the cosmic microwave background spectrum distortion and the ultracompact minihalo abundance can give strict constraints on the phase transitions below 100 GeV, especially for the low-scale phase transitions and some electroweak phase transitions. The current constraints on the phase transition parameters are largely extended by the results of this work, therefore provide an novel approach to probe related new physics.
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