Domain walls seeding the electroweak phase transition

Abstract: Topological defects can act as local impurities that seed cosmological phase transitions. In this paper we study the case of domain walls, and how they can affect the electroweak phase transition in the Standard Model extended with a $Z_2$-odd scalar singlet. When the transition is two-step, the early breaking of the $Z_2$ symmetry implies the formation of domain walls which can then act as nucleation sites for the second step. We develop a method based on dimensional reduction to calculate the rate of the catalyzed phase transition within the 3d theory on the domain wall surface. By comparison with the standard homogeneous rate, we conclude that the seeded phase transition is generically faster and it ultimately determines the way the phase transition is completed. We comment on the phenomenological implications for gravitational waves and baryogenesis.