2016/10/31 by Nicola Bartolo, Chiara Caprini, Valerie Domcke +11 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO #gr-qc #hep-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1475-7516/2016/12/026
published as JCAP 12 (2016) 026 · 53 pages, 18 figures; v2: minor changes to match published version
arxiv created 2016/12/25 · arxiv updated 2016/12/28
We investigate the potential for the LISA space-based interferometer to detect the stochastic gravitational wave background produced from different mechanisms during inflation. Focusing on well-motivated scenarios, we study the resulting contributions from particle production during inflation, inflationary spectator fields with varying speed of sound, effective field theories of inflation with specific patterns of symmetry breaking and models leading to the formation of primordial black holes. The projected sensitivities of LISA are used in a model-independent way for various detector designs and configurations. We demonstrate that LISA is able to probe these well-motivated inflationary scenarios beyond the irreducible vacuum tensor modes expected from any inflationary background.