Speaker
Description
Explaining the observed charged fermion mass hierarchies points to flavour symmetries inducing a suppression of the lighter species’ masses. When the symmetries are global, it is expected that such symmetries are broken by gravity via Planck scale suppressed effective operators. The potential of the spontaneous symmetry-breaking “flavon” field, if the symmetry is discrete, then possesses several minima, with the vacuum-degeneracy lifted by the gravity effects. In such scenarios, domain walls might be generated in the process of symmetry breaking. Due to the bias, however, they potentially annihilate sufficiently before Big Bang nucleosynthesis, avoiding conflict with observations and generating a characteristic contribution to the stochastic gravitational wave background. We discuss whether and how minimalistic supersymmetric and non-supersymmetric realisations of such theories can give rise to observable gravitational waves.