Direct Detection of the Primordial Inflationary Gravitational Waves

Abstract

Inflationary cosmology is successful in explaining a number of outstanding cosmological issues including the flatness, the horizon and the relic issues. More spectacular is the experimental confirmation of the structure as arose from the inflationary quantum fluctuations. However, the physics in the inflationary era is unclear. Polarization observations of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) missions may detect the tensor mode effects of inflationary gravitational waves (GWs) and give an energy scale of inflation. To probe the inflationary physics, direct observation of gravitational waves generated in the inflationary era is needed. In this essay, we advocate that the direct observation of these GWs with sensitivity Omega-gw down to 10**(-23) is possible using present projected technology development if foreground could be separated.

6 pages, 1 figure, received an honorable mention in the 2009 Essay Competition of the Gravity Research Foundation

References in corpus (7)

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