Thermal Gravitational Waves During Reheating

Abstract: In this work, we revisit the generation of stochastic gravitational waves (GWs) from interactions in the thermal plasma. We extend the existing literature by incorporating the reheating phase into the thermal history. Our results show that the amplitude of the GW spectrum can be significantly enhanced because the temperature during reheating can be much higher than the reheating temperature. Furthermore, since the temperature evolution during reheating differs from that of free radiation, the peak frequency of the spectrum can also shift. Additionally, the morphology of the spectrum can present characteristic features. We also compute the contribution of the integrated GW spectrum to the effective number of neutrino species, $\Delta N_\text{eff}$, which can be substantially larger.