The Quest for B Modes from Inflationary Gravitational Waves

By M. Kamionkowski, E. Kovetz. 2015

367 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The search for the curl component (B mode) in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) polarization induced by inflationary gravitational waves is described. The canonical single-field slow-roll model of inflation is presented, and we explain the quantum production of primordial density perturbations and gravitational waves. It is shown how these gravitational waves then give rise to polarization in the CMB. We then describe the geometric decomposition of the CMB polarization pattern into a curl-free component (E mode) and curl component (B mode) and show explicitly that gravitational waves induce B modes. We discuss the B modes induced by gravitational lensing and by Galactic foregrounds and show how both are distinguished from those induced by inflationary gravitational waves. Issues involved in the experimental pursuit of these B modes are described, and we summarize some of the strategies being pursued. We close with a brief discussion of some other avenues toward detecting/characterizing the inflationar...

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/61dff5ce7e09d03b4362db1d6b3f411ad1acbef5

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. S. Allen
2. S. Vagnozzi
3. Andrey V. Kravtsov
4. A. Mantz
5. M. Zaldarriaga
6. David N. Spergel
7. L. Senatore
8. E. di Valentino

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. S. Vagnozzi
2. E. di Valentino
3. S. Allen
4. David N. Spergel
5. Mark Halpern
6. A. Mantz
7. J. Dunkley
8. Eric Linder

Citations in the corpus

• CMB-S4: Forecasting Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves (2020, background): “In addition to the production of PGWs (for a recent review, see Kamionkowski & Kovetz 2016), inflation makes several predictions, most of which—superhorizon fluctuations, Gaussian perturbations, adiabatic fluctuations, spatial flatness, and a nearly scale invariant scalar spectral tilt—have been…”