Gravitational waves from the cosmological QCD transition

We determine the minimum fluctuations in the cosmological QCD phase transition that could be detectable by the eLISA/NGO gravitational wave observatory. To this end, we performed several hydrodynamical simulations using a state-of-the-art equation of state derived from lattice QCD simulations. Based on the fact that the viscosity per entropy density of the quark gluon plasma obtained from heavy-ion collision experiments at the RHIC and the LHC is extremely small, we considered a non-viscous fluid in our simulations. Several previous works about this transition considered a first order transition that generates turbulence which follows a Kolmogorov power law. We show that for the QCD crossover transition the turbulent spectrum must be very different because there is no viscosity and no source of continuous energy injection. As a consequence, a large amount of kinetic energy accumulates at the smallest scales. From the hydrodynamic simulations, we have obtained the spectrum of the gravitational radiation emitted by the motion of the fluid, finding that, if typical velocity and temperature fluctuations have an amplitude Delta v/c greater than or similar to 10(-2) and/or Delta T/T-c greater than or similar to 10(-3), they would be detected by eLISA/NGO at frequencies larger than similar to 10(-4) Hz. (C) 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim