Stochastic gravitational wave background: birth from string-wall death

Abstract We study a new source of stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) from the final collapse of a network of topological defects. Typically, the final collapse is considered negligible for generating gravitational waves (GWs) due to its subdominance compared with the network's long-term evolution in the scaling regime. However, in some cases, a network can be driven outside of horizon by inflation and later re-enter horizon. Then, the network's final collapse after re-entering horizon becomes the dominant GW source and therefore cannot be neglected. We demonstrate this phenomenon in the context of N DW = 1 string-wall networks which naturally arise in axion models, although the framework can be generalized to other types of topological networks. The final collapse of walls bounded by strings releases GWs. Our calculation of the corresponding GW spectrum suggests it could be related to the first few bins of the nano-Hertz SGWB signal possibly detected by various Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) collaborations. However, it is important to note that such GW spectrum falls within a relatively narrow frequency range, which may not completely account for the PTA signal that spans more than one order of magnitude in frequency. Furthermore, with different parameter choices, the resultant GWs generated in this mechanism could be probed by various GW interferometry experiments.