The cosmological stochastic gravitational wave background: challenges & opportunities

by Valerie Domcke (DESY)

Tuesday 4 Dec 2018, 13:15 → 14:15 Europe/Stockholm

FA32

After the spectacular first discovery of gravitational waves by the LIGO/VIRGO collaboration in 2015, we are now preparing for the next big milestone in gravitational wave astronomy: the search for the stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB). Similar to its cousin, the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the SGWB may open up a new window to probe the Early Universe - revealing traces of cosmological processes in principle all the way back to the Big Bang. In this talk I will discuss the challenges and difficulties expecting us in this quest, together with the types of models we hope to probe with this new tool. As a specific example, I will focus on couplings of the inflaton (the particle driving cosmic inflation) to the Standard Model of particle physics which can be probed by the SGWB.