Using a Primordial Gravitational Wave Background to Illuminate New Physics
Abstract
A primordial spectrum of gravitational waves serves as a backlight to the relativistic degrees of freedom of the cosmological fluid. Any change in the particle physics content, due to a change of phase or freeze-out of a species, will leave a characteristic imprint on an otherwise featureless primordial spectrum of gravitational waves and indicate its early-Universe provenance. We show that a gravitational wave detector such as the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna would be sensitive to physics near 100 TeV in the presence of a sufficiently strong primordial spectrum. Such a detection could complement searches at newly proposed 100 km circumference accelerators such as the Future Circular Collider at CERN and the Super Proton-Proton Collider in China, thereby providing insight into a host of beyond Standard Model issues, including the hierarchy problem, dark matter, and baryogenesis.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1812.07577,
title = {Using a Primordial Gravitational Wave Background to Illuminate New Physics},
author = {Robert R. Caldwell and Tristan L. Smith and Devin G. E. Walker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1812.07577},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
7 pages, 3 figures; added references