The History of Inflation from Microwave Background Polarimetry and Laser Interferometry

Abstract

A period of inflation in the early universe produces a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of gravitational waves over a huge range in wavelength. If the amplitude of this gravitational wave background is large enough to be detectable with microwave background polarization measurements, it will also be detectable directly with a space-based laser interferometer. Using a Monte Carlo sampling of inflation models, we demonstrate that the combination of these two measurements will strongly constrain the expansion history during inflation and the physical mechanism driving it.

8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in PRD, minor changes post referee report

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Cited by in corpus (7)

• Implications of the NANOGrav results for inflation
• Inflationary interpretation of the stochastic gravitational wave background signal detected by pulsar timing array experiments
• Primordial gravitational waves from NANOGrav: a broken power-law approach
• Gravitational Wave Direct Detection does not Constrain the Tensor Spectral Index at CMB Scales
• An SZ-Like Effect on Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds
• Inflationary Dynamics Reconstruction via Inverse-Scattering Theory
• Elastic Scattering of Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds: Primordial Black Holes and Stellar Objects