Primordial gravitational waves for universality classes of pseudoscalar inflation

By V. Domcke, M. Pieroni, P. Bin'etruy. 2016

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current bounds from the polarization of the CMB predict the scale-invariant gravitational wave (GW) background of inflation to be out of reach for upcoming GW interferometers. This prospect dramatically changes if the inflaton is a pseudoscalar, in which case its generic coupling to any abelian gauge field provides a new source of GWs, directly related to the dynamics of inflation. This opens up new ways of probing the scalar potential responsible for cosmic inflation. Dividing inflation models into universality classes, we analyze the possible observational signatures. One of the most promising scenarios is Starobinsky inflation, which may lead to observational signatures both in direct GW detection as well as in upcoming CMB detectors. In this case, the complementarity between the CMB and direct GW detection, as well as the possibility of a multi-frequency analysis with upcoming ground and space based GW interferometers, may provide a first clue to the microphysics of inflation.

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06fbc131aec2f0b8c768876f59bb21b68175f524

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Citations in the corpus

Gravitational waves at interferometer scales and primordial black holes in axion inflation (2016, background): “[42] showed that this is indeed possible at N = 10 in the case of Starobinsky inflation [47].”
Reconstructing the spectral shape of a stochastic gravitational wave background with LISA (2019, background): “In certain inflationary scenarios, like in axion-inflation and its variants [12, 15, 146–151], the spectrum of the GW signal may consist of a nearly flat part at low frequencies, followed by a smoothly growing part at high frequencies.”
Science with the space-based interferometer LISA. IV: probing inflation with gravitational waves (2016, methodology): “[94], it was found that among the discrete values of p studied, p = {1, 2, 3, 4}, the most promising candidates for future observations are the Starobinsky class (p = 2) followed by the chaotic class (p = 1).”
Challenges and opportunities of gravitational-wave searches at MHz to GHz frequencies (2020, background): “Domcke et al. (2016); Garcı́a-Bellido et al. (2016) explored the resulting spectrum for several inflaton potentials.”
General Relativity and Cosmology: Unsolved Questions and Future Directions (2016, background): “The observation of primordial gravitational waves would provide vital information on the inflationary epoch [509,510].”