Primordial null energy condition (NEC) violation would imprint a blue-tilted spectrum on gravitational wave background (GWB). However, its implications on the GWB might be far richer than expected. We present a scenario, in which after a slow-roll (NEC-preserving) inflation with Hubble parameter $H\simeq H_{inf1}$, the Universe goes through an NEC-violating period and then enters subsequent slow-roll inflation with a higher $H$ ($=H_{inf2}\gg H_{inf1}$). The resulting primordial gravitational wave spectrum is nearly flat at the cosmic microwave background band, as well as at the frequency $f\sim 1/{\rm yr}$ but with higher amplitude (compatible with the recent NANOGrav result). It is also highlighted that for the multi-stage inflation if the NEC violations happened intermittently, we might have a Great Wall-like spectrum of the stochastic GWB at the corresponding frequency band.
A violation of the null energy condition (NEC) during inflation in a single-field inflation model will naturally enhance the amplitude of the parity violation effect (defined by $Δχ$) of inflationary primordial gravitational waves (GWs), provided the inflaton is non-minimally coupled to a gravitational Chern-Simons term. After going through the NEC-violating phase, the Universe enters subsequent slow-roll inflation with a higher energy scale (i.e., a greater Hubble parameter $H$), which results in an enhanced nearly scale-invariant power spectrum (i.e., $P_{\rm T}$) of inflationary primordial …
Constraints on the Primordial Black Hole Abundance through Scalar-Induced Gravitational Waves from Advanced LIGO and Virgo's First Three Observing Runs
Intermittent type of primordial non-Gaussian fluctuations from modulated preheating can produce an overabundance of $\sim 10^8M_\odot$ mini-haloes at high redshift $z\gtrsim 20$. This may have a significant impact on the formation of high-redshift supermassive black holes.
We speculate that the early Universe was inside a primordial black hole. The interior of the the black hole is a dS background and the two spacetimes are separated on the surface of black hole's event horizon. We argue that this picture provides a natural realization of inflation without invoking the inflaton field. The black hole evaporation by Hawking radiation provides a natural mechanism for terminating inflation so reheating and the hot big bang cosmology starts from the evaporation of black hole to relativistic particles. The quantum gravitational fluctuations at the boundary of black ho…
Galilean genesis is an alternative to inflation, in which the universe starts expanding from Minkowski with the stable violation of the null energy condition. In this paper, we discuss how the early universe is reheated through the gravitational particle production at the trasition from the genesis phase to the subsequent phase where the kinetic energy of the scalar field is dominant. We then study the consequences of gravitational reheating after Galilean genesis on the spectrum of primordial gravitational waves. The resultant spectrum is strongly blue, and at high frequencies $Ω_{\rm gw}\pro…
We study a particular exact solution to the Born-Infeld determinantal gravity consisting of a cosmological model which undergoes a brusque bounce. The latter consists of an event characterized by a non-null (but finite) value of the squared Hubble rate occurring at a minimum (non-null) scale factor. The energy density and pressure of the fluid covering the whole manifold are perfectly well behaved in such an event, but the curvature invariants turn out to be undefined there because of the undefined character of the time derivative of H. It is shown that the spacetime results geodesically compl…
We study a cosmological scenario in which the DBI action governing the motion of a D3-brane in a higher-dimensional spacetime is supplemented with an induced gravity term. The latter reduces to the quartic Galileon Lagrangian when the motion of the brane is non-relativistic and we show that it tends to violate the null energy condition and to render cosmological fluctuations ghosts. There nonetheless exists an interesting parameter space in which a stable phase of quasi-exponential expansion can be achieved while the induced gravity leaves non trivial imprints. We derive the exact second-order…
Assuming that primordial black holes compose a fraction of dark matter, some of them may accumulate at the center of galaxy and perform a prograde or retrograde orbit against the gravity pointing towards the center exerted by the central massive black hole. If the mass of primordial black holes is of the order of stellar mass or smaller, such extreme mass ratio inspirals can emit gravitational waves and form a background due to incoherent superposition of all the contributions of the Universe. We investigate the stochastic gravitational-wave background energy density spectra from the direction…
We propose a novel branch of the Galilean Genesis scenario as an alternative to inflation, in which the universe starts expanding from Minkowski in the asymptotic past with a gross violation of the null energy condition (NEC). This variant, described by several functions and parameters within the Horndeski scalar-tensor theory, shares the same background dynamics with the existing Genesis models, but the nature of primordial quantum fluctuations is quite distinct. In some cases, tensor perturbations grow on superhorizon scales. The tensor power spectrum can be red, blue, or scale invariant, de…
The primordial stochastic gravitational wave background (SGWB) carries first-hand messages of early-universe physics, possibly including effects from inflation, preheating, cosmic strings, electroweak symmetry breaking, and etc. However, the astrophysical foreground from compact binaries may mask the SGWB, introducing difficulties in detecting the signal and measuring it accurately. In this paper, we propose a foreground cleaning method taking advantage of gravitational wave observations in other frequency bands. We apply this method to probing the SGWB with space-borne gravitational wave dete…
We study the singularity of the congruences for both timelike and null geodesic curves using the expansion of the early anisotropic Bianchi type I Universe. In this paper, we concentrate on the influence of the shear of the timelike and null geodesic congruences in the early Universe. Under some natural conditions, we derive the Raychaudhuri type equation for the expansion and the shear-related equations. Recently, scientists working on the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) have shown many possibilities to observing the anisotropy of the primordial gravitational wave b…
Relic gravitational waves from primordial gravitational collapses
Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）；School of Physical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学物理科学学院）；Tsung-Dao Lee Institute and School of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交大汤川研究所和物理与天文学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）；Asia Pacific Center for Theoretical Physics（亚太理论物理中心）
Standard inflationary models yield a characteristic signature of a primordial power spectrum with a red tensor and scalar tilt. Nevertheless, Cannone et al recently suggested that, by breaking the assumption of spatial diffeomorphism invariance in the context of the effective field theory of inflation, a blue tensor spectrum can be achieved without violating the Null Energy Condition. In this context, we explore in which cases a blue tensor tilt can be obtained along with a red tilt in the scalar spectrum. Ultimately, we analyze under which conditions this model can reproduce the specific cons…
The Dark Side of the Moon: Listening to Scalar-Induced Gravitational Waves
Institut de Física d’Altes Energies (IFAE), The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（高等能源物理研究所，巴塞罗那科学技术学院）；Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA)（加泰罗尼亚研究高级学院）；Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校物理系）；PRISMA + Cluster of Excellence & Mainz Institute for Theoretical Physics (MITP), JGU Mainz（PRISMA+卓越集群与美因茨理论物理研究所（MITP），美因茨约翰内斯古腾堡大学）；Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris (IAP), CNRS, Sorbonne Université（巴黎天体物理研究所，法国国家科学研究中心，索邦大学）；Center for Astrophysics and Space Science (CASS), New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校天体物理学与空间科学中心）；Center for Astrophysics and Cosmology, University of Nova Gorica（新戈里察大学天体物理学与宇宙学中心）；Theoretical Physics Department, CERN（欧洲核子研究中心理论物理部）；Physik-Institut, Universität Zürich（苏黎世大学物理研究所）；Departament de Física Quàntica i Astrofísica and Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICC), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学量子天体物理学系与宇宙科学研究所）
Bounds on Gravitational Wave Production from Unitarity in an Early NEC-Violating Model
Institute for Basic Science (IBS)（基础科学研究院）；Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (WPI), UTIAS, The University of Tokyo（东京大学宇宙边缘物理学研究所）
We study the tilt of the primordial gravitational waves spectrum. A hint of blue tilt is shown from analyzing the BICEP2 and POLARBEAR data. Motivated by this, we explore the possibilities of blue tensor spectra from the very early universe cosmology models, including null energy condition violating inflation, inflation with general initial conditions, and string gas cosmology, etc. For the simplest G-inflation, blue tensor spectrum also implies blue scalar spectrum. In general, the inflation models with blue tensor spectra indicate large non-Gaussianities. On the other hand, string gas cosmol…
The conventional slow-roll approximation is broken in the so-called "ultra slow-roll" models of inflation, for which the inflaton potential is exactly (or extremely) flat. The interesting nature of (canonical) ultra slow-roll inflation is that the curvature perturbation grows on superhorizon scales, but has a scale-invariant power spectrum. We study the ultra slow-roll inflationary dynamics in the presence of non-canonical kinetic terms of the scalar field, namely ultra slow-roll G-inflation. We compute the evolution of the curvature perturbation and show that the primordial power spectrum fol…
The current observational constraints still leave a substantial mass window $\sim [10^{-16},10^{-14}] \cup [10^{-13},10^{-12}] M_\odot$ for primordial black holes (PBHs) representing all of dark matter (DM) in our Universe. The gravitational waves (GWs) induced by the curvature perturbations are inevitably generated during the formation of these PBHs, and fall in the frequency band of LISA. Such scalar induced gravitational waves (SIGWs) are supposed to be definitely detected by LISA even when the second-order local-type non-Gaussianity characterized by the parameter $F_{\rm NL}$ is taken into…
Unlike the electromagnetic radiation from astrophysical objects, gravitational waves (GWs) from binary star mergers have much longer wavelengths and are coherent. For ground-based GW detectors, when the lens object between the source and the earth has mass $\sim 1-10^5M_\odot$, the diffraction effect should be considered since the chirping wavelengths are comparable to the scale of the barrier (its Schwarzschild radius). The waveform will thus be distorted as the fringes. In this work, we show that signals from the third-generation GW detectors like the Einstein Telescope (ET) would be a smoki…
Inflationary quantum gravity simplifies drastically in the leading logarithm approximation. We show that the only counterterm which contributes in this limit is the 1-loop renormalization of the cosmological constant. We go further to make a simplifying assumption about the operator dynamics at leading logarithm order. This assumption is explicitly implemented at 1- and 2-loop orders, and we describe how it can be implemented nonperturbatively. We also compute the expectation value of an invariant observable designed to quantify the quantum gravitational back-reaction on inflation. Although ou…
We investigate the inflationary consequences of the oscillating dark energy model proposed by Tián [\href{https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.101.063531}{Phys. Rev. D {\bf 101}, 063531 (2020)}], which aims to solve the cosmological coincidence problem with multi-accelerating Universe (MAU). We point out that the inflationary dynamics belong to slow-roll inflation. The spectral index of scalar perturbations and the tensor-to-scalar ratio $r$ are shown to be consistent with current \textit{Planck} measurements. Especially, this model predicts $r\sim10^{-7}$, which is far below the observation limit…
