Astrophysical and cosmological scenarios for gravitational wave heating

Abstract

Gravitational waves (GWs) passing through a viscous shell of matter are expected to be damped resulting in an increase in the temperature of the fluid as energy is transferred to it from the GWs. In previous work, we constructed a model for this process, obtaining an expression for the temperature distribution inside the shell, and it was shown that the temperature increase can be astrophysically significant. In this paper, we extend the analysis to GW heating and damping following a binary neutron star merge, GW heating during a core-collapse supernova, and primordial gravitational waves due to electroweak first order phase transitions. We model only the GW damping and heating effects, assuming small perturbations on a Minkowski background; thus, we do not obtain precise quantitative predictions, but rather identify scenarios in which the effects may be important.