Estimates of maximum energy density of cosmological gravitational-wave backgrounds
- Creators
- Giblin, John T., Jr.
- Thrane, Eric
Abstract
The recent claim by BICEP2 of evidence for primordial gravitational waves has focused interest on the potential for early-Universe cosmology using gravitational waves. In addition to cosmic microwave background detectors, efforts are underway to carry out gravitational-wave astronomy with pulsar timing arrays, space-based detectors, and terrestrial detectors. These efforts will probe a wide range of times in the early Universe, during which backgrounds may have been produced through processes such as phase transitions or preheating. We derive a rule of thumb (not so strong as an upper limit) governing the maximum energy density of cosmological backgrounds. For most scenarios, we expect the energy density spectrum to peak at values of Ω_(gw)(f)≲10^(−12±2). We discuss the applicability of this rule and the implications for gravitational-wave astronomy.
Additional Information
© 2014 American Physical Society. Received 20 June 2014; published 24 November 2014. T. G. is supported by the National Science Foundation, Grant No. PHY-1068080. E. T. is a member of the LIGO Laboratory, supported by funding from the United States National Science Foundation. LIGO was constructed by the California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology with funding from the National Science Foundation and operates under cooperative agreement Grant No. PHY-0757058.Attached Files
Published - PhysRevD.90.107502.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 53221
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20150106-140411993
- PHY-1068080
- NSF
- PHY-0757058
- NSF
- Created
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2015-01-07Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field