Related papers: Invisible gravitons and large-scale magnetism
The early expansion history of the Universe is constrained by combining the most recent limits on the cosmic gravitons in the audio band and the claimed evidences of the nHz domain. The simplest scenario stipulates that between the end of…
The low-frequency gravitons correspond to typical wavelengths that left the Hubble radius during the early inflationary stages of expansion and reentered after matter radiation equality. Consequently the temperature and the polarization…
According to the common wisdom, between a fraction of the mHz and few Hz the spectral energy density of the inflationary gravitons can be safely disregarded even assuming the most optimistic sensitivities of the space-borne detectors. In…
The high-frequency gravitons can be absorbed by the first and second viscosities of the post-inflationary plasma as the corresponding wavelengths reenter the Hubble radius prior to big-bang nucleosynthesis. When the total sound speed of the…
The spectra of the relic gravitons are customarily normalized in the low-frequency domain where the signal of the concordance paradigm is expected to peak and this is why their contribution to the temperature and polarization anisotropies…
If the refractive index of the relic gravitons increases during a conventional stage of inflationary evolution the spectral energy density is blue at intermediate frequencies above the fHz and then flattens out after a knee that is…
Stochastic backgrounds of relic gravitons of cosmological origin extend from frequencies of the order of the aHz up to the GHz range. Since the temperature and polarization anisotropies constrain the low frequency normalization of the…
During the last three years the pulsar timing arrays reported a series of repeated evidences of gravitational radiation (with stochastically distributed Fourier amplitudes) at a benchmark frequency of the order of $30$ nHz and characterized…
The maximal frequency domain of the cosmic gravitons falls in the THz region where, without conflicting with the existing phenomenological bounds, only few particles with opposite (comoving) three-momenta are produced. Although any reliable…
If the refractive index of the tensor modes increases during a conventional inflationary stage of expansion the relic graviton spectrum is tilted towards high frequencies. Two apparently diverse parametrizations of this effect are shown to…
Since the relic gravitons are produced in entangled states of opposite (comoving) three-momenta, their distributions and their averaged multiplicities must determine the maximal frequency of the spectrum above which the created pairs are…
The diffuse backgrounds of relic gravitons with frequencies ranging between the aHz band and the GHz region encode the ultimate information on the primeval evolution of the plasma and on the underlying theory of gravity well before the…
Cosmic gravitons are expected in the MHz-GHz regions that are currently unreachable by the operating wide-band interferometers and where various classes of electromechanical detectors have been proposed through the years. The minimal chirp…
We show that the spectral energy distribution of relic gravitons mildly increases for frequencies smaller than the $\mu$Hz and then flattens out whenever the refractive index of the tensor modes is dynamical during a quasi-de Sitter stage…
The dynamical evolution of the refractive index of the tensor modes of the geometry produces a specific class of power spectra characterized by a blue (i.e. slightly increasing) slope which is directly determined by the competition of the…
The tensor modes reentering the Hubble radius when the plasma is dominated by a stiff fluid lead to a spectral energy density whose blue slope depends on the total post-inflationary sound speed. This result gets however corrected by a…
A large class of quintessential inflationary models, recently proposed by Peebles and Vilenkin, leads to post-inflationary phases whose effective equation of state is stiffer than radiation. The expected gravitational waves logarithmic…
When the gravitons are created thanks to the variation of the space-time curvature the multiplicity distributions quantify the probability of producing a given number of species around the average occupation numbers of the underlying…
The energy density, the pressure and the anisotropic stress of the relic gravitons do not have a unique gauge-invariant and frame-invariant expression since the equivalence principle ultimately forbids the localization of the…
The timeline of the expansion rate ultimately defines the interplay between high energy physics, astrophysics and cosmology. The guiding theme of this topical review is provided by the scrutiny of the early history of the space-time…