• DOI:10.1126/science.1179541
• Corpus ID: 11804455

Primordial Gravitational Waves and Cosmology

@article{Krauss2010PrimordialGW,
  title={Primordial Gravitational Waves and Cosmology},
  author={Lawrence Krauss and Scott Dodelson and Stephan Meyer},
  journal={Science},
  year={2010},
  volume={328},
  pages={989 - 992}
}

• L. Krauss, S. Dodelson, S. Meyer
• Published 14 April 2010
• Physics
• Science

Astronomical Inflation In astronomy, according to the theory of inflation, the universe underwent a period of extremely accelerated expansion when it was only a fraction of a second old. This process made the universe flat, isotropic, and homogeneous, and it explains how quantum mechanical seeds developed into the large-scale structure we observe today. The theory also predicts that gravitational waves were produced during the early inflationary phase. Alternative theories either predict no gravitational waves or waves with different properties. Krauss et al. (p. 989) review how primordial gravitational waves could provide information on the physics shortly after the Big Bang and how they could be detected indirectly through their imprint on the cosmic microwave background radiation—relic radiation from the Big Bang released when the universe became transparent to electromagnetic radiation. The observation of primordial gravitational waves could provide a new and unique window on the earliest moments in the history of the universe and on possible new physics at energies many orders of magnitude beyond those accessible at particle accelerators. Such waves might be detectable soon, in current or planned satellite experiments that will probe for characteristic imprints in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background, or later with direct space-based interferometers. A positive detection could provide definitive evidence for inflation in the early universe and would constrain new physics from the grand unification scale to the Planck scale.