Probing the origin of our Universe through cosmic microwave background constraints on gravitational waves

Abstract

The next generation of instruments designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) will provide a historic opportunity to open the gravitational wave window to the primordial Universe. Through high sensitivity searches for primordial gravitational waves, and tighter limits on the energy released in processes like phase transitions, the CMB polarization data of the next decade has the potential to transform our understanding of the laws of physics underlying the formation of the Universe.

5 pages + references; Submitted to the Astro2020 call for science white papers

References in corpus (3)

• On the Geometry of the String Landscape and the Swampland
• Evidence of Lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background by Dark Matter Halos
• POLOCALC: a Novel Method to Measure the Absolute Polarization Orientation of the Cosmic Microwave Background

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Foreground Separation and Constraints on Primordial Gravitational Waves with the PICO Space Mission
• Unveiling the nonlinear dynamics of a rolling axion during inflation
• M-theory Cosmology, Octonions, Error Correcting Codes
• The limits of cosmology: role of the Moon
• Zoology of Graviton non-Gaussianities
• Large and small field inflation from hyperbolic sigma models
• Production and backreaction of massive fermions during axion inflation with non-Abelian gauge fields