Related papers: Blue Gravity Waves from BICEP2 ?
The recent discovery of B-modes in the polarization pattern of the Cosmic Microwave Background by the BICEP2 experiment has important implications for neutrino physics. We revisit cosmological bounds on light sterile neutrinos and show that…
We revisit alternative mechanisms of gravitational wave production during inflation and argue that they generically emit a non-negligible amount of scalar fluctuations. We find the scalar power is larger than the tensor power by a factor of…
We performed a Bayesian analysis of pulsar timing residuals from the NANOGrav pulsar timing array to search for a specific form of stochastic narrow-band signal produced by oscillating gravitational potential in the Galactic halo. Such…
We analyse the implications of the Planck data for cosmic inflation. The Planck nominal mission temperature anisotropy measurements, combined with the WMAP large-angle polarization, constrain the scalar spectral index to $n_s = 0.9603 \pm…
There are no reasons why the energy spectra of the relic gravitons, amplified by the pumping action of the background geometry, should not increase at high frequencies. A typical example of this behavior are quintessential inflationary…
Primordial gravitational waves constitute a promising probe of the very early Universe and the laws of gravity. We study in this work changes to tensor-mode perturbations (TMPs) that can arise in various proposed modified gravity (MG)…
We examine the effects of a stiff pre-recombination era on the present day's energy spectrum of the primordial gravitational waves. If the background total equation of state parameter at the pre-recombination era is described by a kination…
The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) has performed the fourth science run, S4, with significantly improved interferometer sensitivities with respect to previous runs. Using data acquired during this science run, we…
We develop a scenario of inflation with spontaneously broken time and space diffeomorphisms, with distinctive features for the primordial tensor modes. Inflationary tensor fluctuations are non adiabatic, and can acquire a mass during the…
We investigate whether an Early-Universe stochastic gravitational-wave background (SGWB) can account for the common spectrum process reported by NANOGrav, while also being consistent with current and projected CMB measurements of extra…
A stochastic gravitational wave background is a prediction of a number of astrophysical and cosmological phenomena including early Universe Cosmology. Recently, the NANOGrav Collaboration reported conclusive evidence for a stochastic…
The third year of observations with the Python microwave background experiment densely sample a $5.5^o\times 22^o$ region of sky that includes the fields measured during the first two years of observations with this instrument. The sky is…
Recently, the nine-year data release of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP9) found that the inflationary models with the scalar spectral index n_s \geq 1 are excluded at about 5\sigma confidence level. In this paper, we set the…
Pulsar timing array (PTA) searches for a gravitational-wave background (GWB) typically include time-correlated "red" noise models intrinsic to each pulsar. Using a simple simulated PTA dataset with an injected GWB signal we show that the…
The detection of B-mode power spectrum by the BICEP2 collaboration constrains the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ for the lensed-$\Lambda$CDM model. The consistency of this big value with the {\em Planck} results requires a…
We perform a Bayesian search in the latest Pulsar Timing Array (PTA) datasets for a stochastic gravitational wave (GW) background sourced by curvature perturbations at scales $10^5~\text{Mpc}^{-1}\lesssim k\lesssim 10^8~\text{Mpc}^{-1}$.…
The detection of a stochastic signal by recent pulsar timing array (PTA) collaborations, including NANOGrav, PPTA, EPTA+InPTA, CPTA and MPTA, has opened a new window to explore gravitational waves (GWs) at nanohertz frequencies. Motivated…
The BICEP2 collaboration reports a detection of primordial cosmic microwave background (CMB) B-mode with a tensor-scalar ratio $r=0.20^{+0.07}_{-0.05}$ (68% C.L.). However, this result is in tension with the recent Planck limit, $r<0.11$…
Solid inflation can support a long period of anisotropic inflation. We calculate the statistical anisotropies in the scalar and tensor power spectra and their cross-correlation in anisotropic solid inflation. The tensor-scalar…
BICEP2 observations, interpreted most simply, suggest an era of inflation with energy densities of order ($10^{16}\, {\rm GeV})^4$, not far below the Planck density. However, models of TeV gravity with large extra dimensions might allow a…