Prospects for direct detection of primordial gravitational waves

2006/02/28 by Sirichai Chongchitnan, G. Efstathiou, George Efstathiou
Physics and Astronomy · #Amplitude #Astrophysics #Black Holes and Theoretical Physics #Cosmic background radiation #Cosmic microwave background #Cosmology and Gravitation Theories #Gravitational wave #Gravitational wave background #Inflation (cosmology) #Omega #Physics #Pulsars and Gravitational Waves Research #Quantum mechanics #Spectral density #Spectral index #Spectral line #Theoretical physics #astro-ph #hep-th

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevd.73.083511

published as Phys.Rev. D73 (2006) 083511 · 11 pages, 3 figures. Minor amendments. Accepted by Phys. Rev. D

openalex publication_date 2006/04/07 · arxiv created 2006/04/08 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We study the primordial gravitational wave background produced in models of single-field inflation. Using the inflationary flow approach, we investigate the amplitude of gravitational wave spectrum, \ensuremathω_gw, in the frequency range 1 mHz--1 Hz pertinent to future space-based laser interferometers. For models that satisfy the current observational constraint on the tensor-to-scalar ratio, r\ensuremath\lesssim0.36, we derive a strict upper bound of \ensuremathω_gw\ensuremath\lesssim1.6\ifmmode×\else\texttimes\fi10^\ensuremath-15 independent of the form of the inflationary potential. Applying, in addition, the observational constraints on the spectral index n_s and its running, \ensuremathω_gw is expected to be considerably lower than this bound unless the shape of the potential is finely tuned. We contrast our numerical results with those based on simple power-law extrapolation of the tensor power spectrum from cosmic microwave background (CMB) scales. In addition to single-field inflation, we summarize a number of other possible cosmological sources of primordial gravitational waves and assess what might be learned from direct detection experiments such as LISA, Big Bang Observer and beyond.

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